Is Perplexity the Next Google? – Search Engine Watch

Very interesting article: How the launch of OpenAI’s GPT-5 has made SEO absolutely irreplaceable moving forward:

This was a great quick read from Dan Petrovic on the release of GPT-5 and the implications it has on SEO. As most everyone knows, GPT-5 was launched late last week and was met with fairly critical reviews in terms of its functionality.

In this article, Dan explains how this launch makes SEO even more valuable than it ever was before. He notes how GPT-5 is trained to be INTELLIGENT but not knowledgable. Instead of creating the system to be able to contain the all the answers it needs, OpenAI made a design choice to make it superior at handling the information its given.

In the article, Dan gives an example of a search for “Does Streamlit have a toggle on/off button”. When answering from its base models, GPT-5 doesn’t give the correct information, while smaller models are able to answer it. However, when turning on search grounding in ChatGPT – the model correctly identifies the issue.

This means that model that will be superior at using the Search ecosystem to correctly answers questions. If the model improves accuracy with grounding on and users switch to this, GPT-5 (and future models) will be using Google/Bing search as the primary knowledge source for their information. As a result, SEO of articles will play a much bigger role in being able to influence the outcomes.

The big assumption here is that users over time prefer to toggle on search grounding, even if that’s not the default experience. My assumption is that many will still use the default experience (letting ChatGPT choose). It also would be interesting to see if ChatGPT starts using the search function more across user prompts.