How OpenAI Rewrote the Rules: A Brand Story

If you hadn’t heard of OpenAI before November, you probably have now. Their story has just about everything — corporate intrigue, betrayal (probably), killer robots (potentially), and even ninjas (allegedly) (at least that’s what some people are saying) (mostly me).

Although OpenAI was founded at the end of 2015, they were a relatively unknown company until the launch of their flagship product, ChatGPT, in December 2022 (just 11 months ago):

This meteoric rise is also reflected in our Brand Authority^TM score for openai.com:

Big brands can take a long time to build (and occasionally moments to derail, in the case of X), and these numbers upend the way we think about brand-building. A Brand Authority of 92 puts OpenAI in the enviable neighborhood of much longer-lived brands like Bank of America, ESPN, and even the United States Postal Service.

However you feel about OpenAI’s recent drama, I believe their story challenges the way we think about the interplay of brand and SEO and how keywords — especially so-called “head” keywords — drive traffic.

Brand Authority reflects real search traffic, so how did OpenAI capture that traffic? From a traditional keyword research perspective, we might start by looking at broad keywords relevant to OpenAI’s business, like “ai chatbot,” “chatbot,” or even “chat.”

The naive assumption is that these keywords are likely to drive the most traffic. So, let’s take a look at these three “head” keywords (leaving some space for a bit of a surprise):

This is an oversimplification, of course, and we’d ideally explore a wide range of keywords ( including long-tail keywords). The bar and number represent the potential traffic for each of these keywords, which is solid, but let’s take a look at the Google results for “chat”:

While OpenAI is ranking 2nd in my browser, you can see that the results are a bit ambiguous, including links to Google Chat, Google Play, and a generic Knowledge Panel for “online chat.” It’s hard to say what someone searching for “chat” really wants. While the potential search volume is attractive, this may be little more than a vanity ranking.

Let’s fill in the blanks on that chart above. The remaining four keywords are all brand/product keywords, and their volume relative to the “head” terms may surprise you:

Brand terms like “openai” and “dall-e” command respectable traffic, on par with broad terms like “chatbot.” Both common spellings of “chatgpt” obliterate the numbers for searches for “chat” alone, commanding almost 15 Million total potential searches per month!

What’s more, let’s take a look at the Google results page for “chatgpt”:

OpenAI captures the top two organic results (due to a subdomain), has sitelinks in the 1st position, captures a branded Knowledge Panel as a known entity, and a “People also ask” box pushes the 3rd organic result below the screen-cut. This is a result where OpenAI/ChatGPT essentially owns page one and captures a massive share of clicks.

The fact that “chat” is a shorter version of either “chatgpt” or “chat gpt” means nothing. As search engines get more sophisticated and people are more willing to use natural language, we can’t naively assume that shorter phrases drive more traffic. People are specifically looking for ChatGPT because they know what they want, and that has a double-edged impact on both search volume and clicks/engagement.

What’s even more remarkable is that these two terms driving 15 Million in potential monthly traffic didn’t even exist a year ago. OpenAI didn’t embark on an SEO journey to capture traffic from a competitor — they created this traffic out of thin air and immediately owned it.

I’m not trying to suggest that OpenAI is a typical case, but the extreme brand tilt of their SEO demonstrates that the keywords we think of as being the most attractive may leave out a lot of potential. Millions of people were looking for a product that didn’t exist prior to ChatGPT, and when that need was satisfied, it created an entirely new SEO opportunity.

That’s the power of brand. Search doesn’t start with the algorithm’s response to words in a box or even with the words themselves — it starts with an idea in the searcher’s mind. Strong brands resonate in people’s minds and drive their search demand, intercepting the process in a way that subverts traditional SEO and the competition.