How to be found

I would like to share a recent experience with you, that made me realize how deep we already have arrived in this new world. We might ask ourselves, what is going to happen next and what are the grand visions, and when will all of this hit in - until we realize that the Future is already happening full swing.

Here is what happened: I had a conversation with a CEO who will bring his senior executive leadership team to a Silicon Valley Tour, early next year. We are already panning out the details of the program, and what would make this experience a success for his team and all, and quite randomly, I asked him: where/how did you actually find us? And he responded: „To be honest, I don‘t know. But I think, my secretary found you on chatGPT.“

First I got curious as well, and tried chatGPT. To my shock, it did not suggest Conference on Wheels in first place to me - but upon asking, it returned in very accurate detail, what the program is about and how it differentiates from other Silicon Valley Tours. Cheeky as I am, I asked chatGPT for a personal reference „if you had to chose, where would you book?“ and got the very satisfying response: „If I were to book a Silicon Valley Inspiration Tour, I would go with Conference on Wheels.“

So that‘s actually interesting. Because here is what just happened:

In the 1990ies, you basically did not exist if your company was not listed in the Yellow Pages. The Yellow Pages were more or less the main resource to look up a company. Every country had their own version, but one thing they all had in common: there was not really a 2nd player on the market.

In the 2000s until recently, the same is true for google. If your business does not appear on the first page on google, your business does not exist. Pardon the generalization, there are many businesses who do not rely on being found on google. I hope, you know what I am talking about and we can agree, here.

To get ranked on google, a catalog of measurements put you first on the search results. SEO, Ads, backlinks,…google opened up a whole industry who helps businesses doing well on their google ranking.

And now, chatGPT is the next search engine. Companies are well adviced, digging into their relevance set of the worlds biggest and most used LLM. Try it, ask several prompts and experience the response. Does chatGPT respond what you hope it does? Do you own the narrative of what the Internet says about you/your company?

Year Google Searches (per day) ChatGPT Prompts (per day)

2022 8.5 billion 10 million

2023 8.5 billion 500 million

2024 8.5 billion 1 billion

Despite the fact that I am comparing apples with pears, I think that this development allows a projection on the impact of findability that chatGPT will have for users and customers.

Thoughts?