Why ChatGPT Launched ATLAS (and What It Means for Marketers)

So, OpenAI just launched ChatGBT Atlas. This is a brand new browser built around ChatGBT, and a lot of people are talking about this being the death of Google. So, in this video, we're going to take a look at what it is, how it works, what it does really well, what it does maybe not so well, and talk about what this means for Google, for the world, and of course, for us digital marketers. Let's go. So, Chat Atlas feels fairly familiar when you log in. As you're setting it up, you can port in your history, your passwords, your autofills from other browsers like Chrome and Safari. So, by the time you get in here, you've got all your search history, you've got your bookmarks, and it feels like you're at home. So, you've got a typical Chat GPT interface here, getting the same sort of results as you would get with any Chat GPT conversation. You can see the websites that have been referenced. You've got these tabs up at the top here. So, home is like your default chat GBT. You've got a search option which gives you a bit more of a traditional Google 10 blue links thing which by the way feels really outdated when you're used to using chat GPT for a while. You can also see images when they load. I think these are being pulled from Google. The same with videos and then the same from news as well. Now one of the things that you'll notice if you start using this and use chat GPT as your default search is it's quite a bit slower than Google. Google is so fast it feels instant and if you're used to default typing something in here and immediately getting results with chat GBT you don't get that so it can be a little frustrating to begin with but there's some stuff on here that you can't do on Google so it's just trade-offs isn't it you can click on any of these websites then you can then talk to the page using chat GPT so if I just click that little ask chat GPT button I might want to say what is the data source this page is using and then it's going to look at this page answer. It's going to go back to its memory as well and eventually it's going to give me some sort of information about this. There we go. So, we've got that. So, that's pretty cool. And this is one of the key features of a chat GPT atlas is that you've got your chat GPT with you all the time. And this can also tap into your memory. So, it this is your chat GPT account. It's not like a new conversation each time. It's got memory about the stuff that you've talked about previously. So, it's a pretty cool thing. The other thing that's quite nice is that it's got history and it's got all your bookmarks in. Let's say I'm on this page here. I'm just This is a spreadsheet that I was working on a little while ago on Safari and it's come straight into chat GPT Atlas. So, let's just open that and we can see this is a phone system for one of our businesses. If I just click that tab to ask chat GPT, I might want to say something like, can you rewrite the intro of this phone system to be less formal? And let's see if it can manage to do that. So, it's got access to the information on the page. So, it should just be able to find work out what the intro piece is and then give me more up to date one. So, there we go. So, it's found it. It's found the original one. and it's worked out what's the intro and it's given me some options here. Really nice, really quick. You can see the benefit of doing something like that. Now, it does have limitations. If I was to say, okay, update the spreadsheet to use option three. It's a spelling mistake, but it doesn't really matter. It still seems to get it. It's It's not going to be able to do that. It can't take action on this page yet. Maybe it would have been able to in agent mode, but it's just given me this. Let's say replace the text in the sheet. Don't think it's going to be able to do that. I think it's just going to keep asking me verification questions. There we go. Failed to do it. Okay, so we can't do everything yet, but it's definitely getting there. One of the other main selling points of chat GBT Atlas is of course agent mode. So agent mode allows the browser to go and do things on your behalf. So, I've activated agent mode here, and I've asked it to go and find me the iPhone with the best camera and biggest memory and order it for me. Dangerous. Let's see what it does. So, we're going to watch this get started, and then we're going to leave it to it because it is going to take a little while to go through all of that. It's doing a bit of planning first. It's working out what it's going to do. If you're expecting an instant response from something like this, you're going to be very, very disappointed indeed. Now, I actually did this before and it took about seven minutes to get to this stage with the right iPhone in the cart. Would I have used that? I don't think so. Because firstly, it takes so long. You're not going to sit there and watch it. But at the same time, if you're buying the latest iPhone, you probably want to verify that it's doing the right thing and it's choosing the right options. It takes so long. Like, watching it do its thing is incredibly infuriating. It's like watching someone who's never used the internet struggle their way around and you just want to take over and just do it. And you could probably do it in about a minute, but it takes absolutely ages. So, you can see we've only just figured out what search term to look for. I did run a test asking it to go and book me an MRI appointment locally for a shoulder. And it got pretty far to be fair, but it again it kept asking me for what do you need to do here? Which body pile? It keeps asking me these follow-up questions. And the end result was I should have just done it myself. It would have been a lot quicker to do it myself. Whilst we're on the topic of limitations, having chat GPT as your default search mode, it does take some getting used to. So, you're probably used to, for example, if you see something that you want or you want to go to a website, just typing it into your browser. Let's say I like the look of this water bottle and I want to buy another one. I might just type in Lark bottle. And then what I might expect is that I'd see a link to the Lark website where I could click it or I could see some products where I could click to buy one that I liked. That's obviously not what you get on Chat GBT. What this is doing is it's giving me some information about a particular model of their bottles. That's not really what I wanted, but that had to guess at my intent because it's ChatGBT. It's not Google. Of course, I could click along the top here to go and do a search, but again, this is a much more limited search than if I just gone straight onto Google. So whilst I kind of like the browser, there are times where I find myself wishing that the default search mode in Chat GPT Atlas was actually Google. So I think that's one of the limitations and probably one of the reasons that this isn't going to immediately become everybody's default browser. And while we're on the topic of everybody, let's have a look at what the world is saying about Chat GBT Atlas since it launched. At the time of making this, this product has been out for a couple of days now. This is a Google trends graph showing relative interest in Google Chrome which is the red line here. Chatgbt Atlas which is the blue line and then Plexity comet which is another type of search engine like this run by Plexity and that's the yellow line there. But obviously we got Google Chrome which is a fairly steady level interest chatb atlas interest did exceed it for about a day and then it seems to have dropped down and it's now on par or maybe slightly under Google Chrome. So obviously it's very early days. We're like 2 days in. But this to me does not look like the viral runaway success that original chat GBT was. That's a pretty high bar. Sure, that was the most successful product launch of all time, but I can understand it, right? This isn't going to be a viral smash where everybody's texting, "Oh my gosh, have you tried New Chat GPT Atlas? It's just unbelievable. It's completely blown my mind about the possibilities of internet browsing." I don't think this is that. Nevertheless, it is still incredibly interesting. If we have a look at Reddit sentiment to see what people are saying on Reddit, this kind of matches my observations from having a look at what people are saying about it online. Some people are positive. They like how ChatGpt is built into the search, built into their browsing. It has memory about what websites they're visiting. They can ask questions. If they've got some long-term plans that they've been working with Chat GPT on, they can feed information from those websites in. It's just nice and straightforward to have everything in the same window. Other people are skeptical. They think that maybe the product doesn't feel ready for launch yet. There are some niggles. There are some bugs. A lot of people saying they've got privacy concerns. They trust Google. They trust Apple with their data, their passwords, their autofills, their website search history. Whereas a lot of people saying they do not trust Open AI with that information. So there we go. Before we move on, let's go and have a look and see how ChatGBT Atlas is doing with our attempt to buy the biggest memory storage with the best camera. It looks like we are pretty much here, although we seem to have two of them in our basket. So, we've got two iPhone 17 Pro Maxes. Oh, it's just taken one out. Nice. How cool was that? It's taken absolutely ages. Like I said before, it took full 7 minutes to get to that stage previously. Interestingly, that's gone to the John Lewis website because I think the next battleground in e-commerce is making sure that when someone runs a search like that, that checkout is coming through your website rather than somebody else's. And the team at Exposure Ninja are digging into ChatGpt Atlas as we speak, figuring all of this stuff out. We've done a lot of stuff with AI search optimization and getting our clients recommended inside chat GPT. And of course that is immediately getting them recommended inside chat GPT atlas. Oh, looks like we've just undone the removal. [laughter] This is quite the quite the experience. Anyway, we'll leave it to it. Eventually, it's going to get somewhere. Whether or not it's where we want to be, that's another question. So, what does all of this mean? I think the company that is most impacted by this is actually Google because Google stands to lose two things from ChatGpt Atlas. The first thing that Google might lose is default search behavior. When you go to Google Chrome or when you're using an Apple phone and you're using Safari and you type something into the bar, you go through to Google. That behavior is so valuable to Google that Google pays Apple $20 billion a year so that when you type something into Safari, you go to Google. Why is that behavior valuable? It's valuable because firstly, you're going on to Google. So you might click on some ads and Google gets paid from those ad clicks. But secondly, having people using Google all the time improves Google because Google gets more data, gets more feedback from users about how its search is working. It gets to see how people are using different websites and how far they're scrolling down the page on Google and which search results they're clicking. All of that is really useful for Google to make its search engine better, which keeps people coming back, which keeps making it lots and lots of money. So default search behavior is very highly priced and this changes that because default search on chat GBT it atlas is obviously chat GPT not Google okay it's actually very difficult to get to Google from chat GPT atlas you have to go to a thing and type in google.com which many of us haven't done for many years because default is always google the second thing that Google stands to lose from chat GBT atlas is the data from Google Chrome. Google Chrome is one of the world's top browsers and Google can use the usage data from Google Chrome to again improve its understanding about the internet and improve its search. This is so important to Google in fact that during the antitrust case or during the ruling after the antitrust case when it was revealed that Google wasn't going to have to sell Chrome, Google's stock jumped 8%. just on the news that it wasn't going to have to sell Chrome because Chrome is so important for Google to see how people are using websites, where they're scrolling through to, which page they go to after this page, and how far down the page they're lowering them, or what they fill in on their D. All of that data is really useful for Google to see how each web pages is being used, and then it can feed that back into it search algorithm when it's identifying which websites to show in which order, establishing quality and authority. So this is potentially massive for Google because it loses default search and it loses all of that usage data. So what's going to happen to businesses potentially? I think if your business is used to relying on traffic from Google organic, from Google discover or from search ads, you may see a drop in traffic as a result. you will have already seen a drop in organic search traffic as a result of people using tools like chat GPT and even Google's own AI overviews. So that is already happening. But this chat GPT outlets may accelerate that decline potentially. Depends how many people are going to use this. And of course it's going to mean lower search volumes for search ads. So if you're very used to using those as a main traffic source, this is really a signal that you do need to get to grips with how to get ChatGpt recommending your brand. Don't just rely on Google. you need to be having chat GBT recommend your brand as well. So what might happen as a result of this? I think that there are two possible outcomes. The first possible outcome is that early adopters jump on chat GBT atlas. We get using it. We have a play with it. ChatGBT and OpenAI are looking at all of that data and they use it to improve the product and eventually they launch it through the chat GBT window to all of the chat GBT users. those hundreds of millions or maybe billions of users by now, they push it out to people and say, "Hey, download the new chat GBT browser and we'll give you some usage increase or limit rate increase or whatever if you set it as your default browser." That could theoretically get ChatGpt Atlas hundreds of millions of downloads relatively quickly because we are all using chat GPT a lot of our time. That's the first thing that might happen. If that happened, that would further erode Google's search dominance for the reasons that we talked about, the loss of default search behavior and the loss of that Chrome user data as well. The second possibility though is that Google looks at all of this and says, "Interesting. This browser's cute. These features are cute." And then it just builds this functionality into Google Chrome via its own Gemini AI tool, which is incredible. By the way, if it does that, what it's probably doing is not neutralizing the threat from Open AI, but it's probably slowing a potential drop in users. Because if you're already using Chrome, if you're already used to Chrome, it already opens as default in your search team. And now you've got this really useful little Gemini AI tool in the side panel, you may look at Chat GP Atlas and think, I don't really need to switch. And in that case, Google would then slow the the drop in its search it core search business. And this is basically how Google has played the AI race so far. Because what did it do when it got threatened by chat GPT? It basically built a sort of chat GPT answer into the top of its search results. Why is it doing this? Not to kill chat GPT, but just to reassure people that if you want an AI answer, you don't need to go to chat GPT. You can just you got one there. You got an AI overview or you can just go to AI mode if you want it to be even more chat GPT. Right? So I think that's probably the most likely route is that Google responds by adding this sort of functionality to its Google Chrome browser. But either way for marketers this shows the direction of travel. Chat GPT atlas shows us where things are going. The more data Open AI and Chat GPT get, the more people are using it, the more they're browsing with it, the better it's going to get, the more useful it's going to get, the more it's going to know about you, the more people are going to use it. That's going to accelerate any move away from traditional search. the more browser data they get, accelerate people away from traditional search. So, Google search is not dead. Google search will not be dead for some time. But if you're a business that relies on traffic to your website, you absolutely need to be getting to grips with getting your business ranked, recommended, getting your products and services recommended inside Chat GBT. This is not a drill. You can't just ignore this. You can't just hope that this stuff goes away. It's not going away. If anything, Chat GBT is going to accelerate that transition. Two things that you can do. Firstly, you can watch one of the videos on the Exposure Ninja channel. We've posted some very recent videos about how you can adapt your SEO strategy to optimize for AI search. It's one of the things that we do at Exposure Ninja. We get our clients recommended inside Chat GPT. We're very good at it. We've got some incredible results for clients who are picking up loads of traffic now and sales from Chat GBT. So, that's definitely a good thing to do. you can familiarize yourself with the particular strategies you need to do that. The other thing that you can do is you can request a digital marketing review from the team here at Exposure Ninja. So, if you're if you're a brand and you're looking at this thinking, "My gosh, this looks crazy. I don't know what we're going to do about this, but I know we need to do something." The team at Exposion Ninja can help. Go to exposuringinja.com/re. Tell us a bit about your business. We will analyze your visibility in these platforms at the moment and we'll map you through out a prioritized action plan over the next six months to help you increase the visibility that you've got in these platforms to generate more leads and sales from ChatGpt and other AI tools. So that's completely free at exposurinja.com/re. Although not everybody is eligible, so you do need to apply for it. So I hope you've enjoyed this video. What do you think about ChatGBT Atlas? And most importantly, is this going to become your default browser? Let us know in the comments. See you soon.