David Sorauer

I think @top5seo's article is one of the most helpful and comprehensive breakdowns of how ChatGPT (most likely) works that I've ever read. Note: parts of the article are speculative, but David provides a lot of compelling evidence for why ChatGPT is most likely to work this way: Absolutely worth reading the whole thing, but the TL;DR: ⭐️ ChatGPT works a lot like a search engine-like system: it pulls in real-world info and stitches it together, rather than actually “thinking” on its own. ⭐️ It doesn’t automatically browse the web. It only goes looking things up when the system decides it actually needs to. ⭐️ Behind the scenes, it’s not just one model doing everything: ⭐️⭐️ First, a small model looks at your question and decides whether the answer can come from training data or needs a search. ⭐️⭐️ If a search is needed, another model handles finding and filtering web results before the main model writes the response. ⭐️ Those search decisions are based on probabilities — things like “no search,” “quick search,” or “deep search,” depending on how complex the question seems. ⭐️ When web search is used, ChatGPT starts by pulling in a small set of top search results. But ranking alone doesn't guarantee inclusion; the page still has to pass semantic relevance checks. ⭐️ When ChatGPT does search, it doesn’t just grab whole pages. It pulls in candidates, scores them by meaning, and feeds only the most relevant snippets into the final answer. ⭐️ It uses tiny chunks of pages, not full articles, and it cares more about meaning than exact keywords. ⭐️ Speed and cost matter. If a page is slow or expensive to process, it might get skipped - even if the content is good. ⭐️ For anything complicated, timely, or niche, fresh web info is key. Training data alone usually isn’t enough, so real-time context makes a big difference. ⭐️ If you want your content to show up in AI answers, clarity helps - clean structure, direct answers, and well-written explanations make it easier for the system to pull useful snippets. queryburst.com/blog/how-chatg…

Lots of people at #AhrefsEvolve were asking for my slides. I've uploaded them to speakerdeck.com/patrickstox/ge… so that everyone can see them.

Today we released the August 2025 spam update. It may take a few weeks to complete, and we'll post on the Google Search Status Dashboard when the rollout is done: status.search.google.com/incidents/a7Aa…

NEW research: sparktoro.com/blog/new-resea… Thanks to @LiveDatos, we've got remarkable charts showing: - The changing growth rate of AI tool use - Distribution of AI usage - How traditional search engines have fared Trust me, you don't want to miss it 😉👇