Long the enemy of the open web, it would appear OpenAI’s ChatGPT might be having a change of heart as it seeks to IPO and become one of the most valuable companies in the world. Earlier this week the company rolled out their new Business Hub which they claim will contain some type of prompt data and show clicks from inside ChatGPT to websites. Now, they’re going even further to win over the open web critics and placing a block of 5 links above many of the prompt responses.

In the testing I found though there was only one catch – the user had to be logged out of ChatGPT to see the list of links. Logged in users still got the familiar verbose blocks of text they are used to.

So far in my testing the block of links shows up in 90% of scenarios where the user types in a series of keywords or a question and it always appears above the prompt response from ChatGPT even if the query is about a finding a local business the block of links are above the map + local businesses ChatGPT has been showing for awhile now.

This isn’t isolated to one geographic region either as a test market. ChatGPT is showing links in every major metro we serve.

We found them looking for an attorney or transportation provider in Dallas, a honky tonk in Fort Worth, an accounting company in Houston, bbq restaurants in Kansas City, restaurants in Nashville, spots where celebrities frequent in LA, and more.

The links also appeared across industries from home services, to ecommerce, SaaS, and B2B service providers. Even numerous software questions and travel planning questions showed web links first.

There is also no limitation to the type of web content being included. I found recipes, listicles, short blog posts, YouTube videos, service pages, Reddit posts, Facebook posts and videos, and even some products.

If this test sticks it could mean more downstream traffic will be unlocked for the first time since AI came out in 2022.

Examples of ChatGPT’s links appearing across various topics and types of prompts and various metro regions:

This single move could completely redefine how SEO agencies like our Dallas SEO Company and others offer SEO services in the future. We’ve known ChatGPT was building an internal search tool, but every SEO assumed it was designed to replace their API partners and the loss of being able to scrape Google. Now it appears they may have built this to build a blended SERPs + AI experience like Google has.