The Real Risk of GenAI Search Isn’t Lost Traffic – It’s Misattribution
Fascinating, if predictable, findings on ChatGPT source attribution, via TechCrunch – with significant implications for the emerging “Generative Engine Optimisation” successor to SEO that should concern anyone publishing online.
Short version – ChatGPT’s ability to provide accurate citations for the sources of its information remains extremely hit and miss, despite the rise of GenAI search:
“the fundamental issue is OpenAI’s technology is treating journalism ‘as decontextualized content’, with apparently little regard for the circumstances of its original production”
In other words, GenAI focuses on the substance, not the source. It doesn’t matter where a story / insight actually originated – only where the GenAI tool considers is most plausible for it to have originated.
This isn’t just a question of lost traffic due to the lack of a link – there are far more serious implications here.
For example, if you’re a corporate brand producing a big chunky piece of thought leadership based on months of research, this means you could find your work misattributed to a direct competitor if the GenAI algorithms decide a competitor is more likely to have produced something like this. Equally, someone else’s work – or opinion – may be attributed to you.
This is, of course, a potentially huge liability for any brand – especially as hostile actors could use this flaw in the way these tools work to game the system, similar to the old days of Googlebombing, and make it look like your brand has said something it hasn’t.
But it gets worse – there’s nothing* you can do about it:
“Nor does completely blocking crawlers mean publishers can save themselves from reputational damage risks by avoiding any mention of their stories in ChatGPT. The study found the bot still incorrectly attributed articles to the New York Times despite the ongoing lawsuit, for example.”
Welcome to the age of GenAI…
(* well, nothing guaranteed to work all the time, at least…)