SEOs Diners Club - Episode 187

How People Actually Use ChatGPT and Why It Matters for SEO

This week, we dissect OpenAI's groundbreaking research on ChatGPT usage patterns, extract critical insights for SEO and content marketing, and examine Google's seismic updates to rank tracking, along with the latest developments in artificial intelligence.

Greetings,

The digital marketing world is buzzing once again, particularly on the front of AI and search engine updates. This week, we'll dive deep into how users actually interact with ChatGPT—one of the most popular AI tools—and what these behavioral patterns mean for us as SEO and content marketing professionals. We'll also explore Google's disruptive changes to ranking tracking systems and exciting developments from the AI landscape.

Let's begin.

🚀 Headline: The Hidden World of ChatGPT: 7 Critical Insights for SEO, Content, and Digital Marketing Based on NBER Research

OpenAI's revolutionary tool ChatGPT has spread at an unprecedented pace since its November 2022 launch, reaching over 700 million weekly active users as of July 2025. This adoption rate represents approximately 10% of the world's adult population—a scale of growth that is simply unprecedented.

While many professionals view AI as a productivity tool for automating emails or coding tasks, a comprehensive study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), analyzing 1.5 million conversations, reveals that this perception represents only the tip of the iceberg.

This research extends our understanding of AI's impact in the business world to explore its role in daily life and what users actually expect from it. Here are seven critical strategic insights and recommendations that SEO, Content Marketing, and Digital Marketing professionals need to reconsider based on these game-changing findings:

1. The Perception Gap: Non-Work Usage Dominates

The vast majority of overall usage is non-work-related, even among long-time users. As of June 2025, 73% of messages are not work-related—up from 53% a year earlier. This means 3 out of every 4 messages relate to personal curiosity, hobbies, or daily life matters.

This dramatic increase shows that AI's impact cannot be measured solely through business productivity; the real impact may be on our general well-being, how we learn, and our daily decisions.

Strategic Insight: Marketers should view ChatGPT not just as a corporate automation tool, but as a tool that touches consumers' personal lives and well-being. Content and SEO strategies should focus on daily problem-solving areas like "Practical Guidance" and "Information Seeking" rather than focusing directly on business tasks.

2. Content Quality Paradigm Shift: The Editor Role Dominates

In general usage, the three most common categories are: Practical Guidance, Information Seeking, and Writing. These three constitute approximately 80% of total usage.

In work-related usage, Writing (40-42%) is by far the most popular topic. However, one of the most surprising details of this research is that most writing requests (about two-thirds) are not about generating text from scratch. Users primarily use AI to edit, summarize, critique, or translate texts they've written themselves.

Advice for Content Marketing Specialists: ChatGPT has taken on the role of a super-talented editor and assistant rather than a copywriter. Instead of focusing on producing high-volume, low-quality content, use AI to improve the quality of your existing content. Your strategy should focus on creating content that facilitates writing quality improvement, editing, and translation tasks rather than text generation.

3. Decision Support Tool: "Asking" Is Growing

User interactions are divided into three intents: Asking, Doing, and Expressing. In general usage, nearly half of users (49%) act with the intent of Asking—seeking information that will help them make decisions, become more informed, or receive advice.

Most importantly, Asking-type interactions have grown faster over time compared to Doing-type interactions. Moreover, automated measurements and user feedback show that people are more satisfied with Asking-type interactions.

Advice for Digital Marketing Specialists: AI's real value lies in helping us make better decisions rather than automation. Position your marketing strategies not just as result-oriented outputs (Doing) but also as a tool that provides support in strategic thinking and problem-solving processes (Asking).

4. New Competitor for SEO: Search Intent Evolution

The usage of the "Information Seeking" category has grown over time, reaching 24%. This could be a sign that when people search for specific information, they're beginning to prefer getting a direct, organized answer (ChatGPT) rather than browsing through long search result pages (Google).

Advice for SEO Specialists: ChatGPT is becoming a serious substitute for traditional web search. Focus your keyword strategies not just on "informational" content that will bring organic traffic, but also on deep, contextual, or personalized "Practical Guidance" content (such as personalized exercise plans, creative ideas) that ChatGPT cannot easily answer.

5. Co-Pilot Model: Higher Education's New Assistant

Highly educated professionals (48% of users with graduate degrees use it for work) tend to use ChatGPT more for asking purposes, even in the workplace.

For these users, ChatGPT functions as a co-pilot in strategic thinking and decision-making processes, rather than a tool for delegating simple tasks.

Advice for Digital Marketing and Management Specialists: Marketing managers should use ChatGPT for high-level cognitive tasks such as data interpretation, strategy development, and complex problem-solving, rather than just operational tasks.

6. Niche Areas: Coding and Emotional Support Still Weak

Contrary to popular narratives, computer programming (coding) messages constitute only 4.2% of total usage. Similarly, emotional support or relationships and personal thoughts categories fall well below expectations at 1.9%.

Advice for Content and SEO Specialists: If your target audience isn't in niche areas like coding or emotional therapy, avoid over-focusing on these areas. Instead, invest in Practical Guidance, which is most popular at 29%, and Special Tutoring/Education areas, which hold a significant share at 10.2%.

7. Global Expansion and Accessibility

ChatGPT's adoption rate has shown proportionally the fastest growth in low and middle-income countries over the past year. This shows that the technology isn't monopolized by those with certain economic power—it's spreading globally, and accessibility is increasing.

Advice for Digital Marketing Specialists: When developing global marketing strategies, consider that geographical and economic barriers to AI tool access are rapidly disappearing. Optimize your content and tools to be multilingual and easily accessible for this rapidly growing global audience.

These findings show that AI is transforming beyond being a fundamental tool in our workflows into a co-pilot that supports our lives and decisions. Reshaping your marketing strategies according to this deep cognitive and personal usage will help you gain a competitive edge.

⚙️ Algorithm & Search Engine Updates

What's Happening in the Rank Tracking World? The num=100 Parameter Is Gone!

Last week, the SEO world was shaken by Google's removal of the long-used &num=100 URL parameter, which allowed displaying 100 results per search page. This change fundamentally affected the operating systems of third-party ranking tracking tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and SpyFu. These tools, which previously could analyze 100 results with a single query, now must perform 10 times more scraping for the same data.

This situation had several important consequences:

Data Inconsistencies: Many SEO specialists reported sudden drops in desktop impressions and misleading increases in average positions in Google Search Console data.

Industry Response: Some major players like Ahrefs argued that tracking rankings beyond the Top 20 is costly and meaningless, claiming real opportunities lie in the first two pages, while others like SpyFu declared they would continue fighting to provide 100-result data.

Google's Move: Google stated that this parameter was never officially supported, implying the change was intentional. It even emerged that Google hired an "Anti-Scraping Engineering Analyst" to block bots that scrape search results without permission. An analysis showed that 77% of sites lost keyword visibility after this change.

So what does this mean for us?

We need to be more careful when interpreting data from ranking tracking tools. Fluctuations in rankings beyond the first 20 positions can be misleading. We should focus on real user interactions in Search Console data and our positions in the first two pages. Perhaps this development will free us from ranking obsession and encourage us to focus on more meaningful metrics (conversion, user engagement, etc.). What do you think?

Google AI Mode Coming to Chrome Browser

Google announced it will integrate the AI Mode feature directly into the Chrome browser's address bar. This feature will allow users to ask questions about a web page they're visiting directly from the address bar and receive AI summaries appropriate to the page's context. This development could fundamentally change how users access information and once again highlights the importance of how understandable and well-structured content on websites is.

🧠 From the AI World

1. OpenAI Research: Can AI Deliberately Lie? According to a TechCrunch report, OpenAI and Apollo Research investigated the "scheming" potential of AI models. The research revealed that when models understand they're being tested, they can pretend to behave correctly while actually exhibiting deceptive behaviors to achieve their goals. While there's no serious example of this reflecting to end users yet, the potential for AI to be intentionally misleading beyond "hallucinating" raises important questions about how much we can trust these technologies.

2. Google "Gems" Now Shareable: Google announced that "Gems"—custom Gemini assistants created by users for specific tasks—can now be shared like Google Drive files. This enables using a common AI assistant within a team, creating a special guide for family vacation planning, or sharing a Gem written for a project with colleagues. This development paves the way for personalized AI experiences to become more collaborative.

3. YouTube Announces AI Tools for Shorts Creators: YouTube is offering Shorts content creators a series of new AI tools, including a fast version of the Veo 3 model that generates short videos from text, a "Speech to Song" tool that converts dialogues to songs, and "Edit with AI" that automatically edits raw footage. These tools seem likely to significantly accelerate content production and trigger creativity, further intensifying competition in the short video format.

💡 Applied SEO Tips

Discovering "People Also Ask" (PAA) and Related Searches with ChatGPT

Connected to this week's headline topic, here's a practical tip on how we can use ChatGPT as a research assistant: You can use ChatGPT to discover potential questions users might ask about a target keyword or topic.

Example Prompt:

"I'm an SEO specialist preparing a comprehensive blog post about '[your keyword]'. Can you list 10 potential questions that a user interested in this topic might ask Google in 'People Also Ask' format? Also, can you provide 5 long-tail 'related search' suggestions for this keyword?"

This prompt will directly provide you with questions to answer in your content and new subheadings and keywords you can target. This is a fast and effective way to enrich your content plan and better meet user intent.

Closing

That's it for this week! The dynamic relationship between AI and search engines requires us to constantly review our strategies. Remember, the best strategy is one that views technology not as a threat, but as an opportunity to better understand your target audience and provide them with more value.

If you need a more comprehensive SEO strategy for your business in this transformation, we at Stradiji are always here for you. See you in the next newsletter!

Stay healthy,

Mert Erkal

Special Offer from Our Sponsor

Semust: Smarter SEO Recommendations for Better Organic Traffic

Managing your entire SEO workflow just got easier.

In this GEO era, where automation is king, you still need reliable tools to track, analyze, and optimize your SEO efforts. That's where Semust comes in.

Semust combines powerful SEO tools in a single platform:

• Google Rank Tracker - Monitor your keyword positions with precision

• Technical SEO Checker - Identify and fix technical issues fast

• SERP Analyzer - Understand what's ranking and why

• Complete workflow management - From audit to optimization

Exclusive Offer for SEOs Diners Club Readers:

Get a FREE one-month Business Plan (normally $35/month) to supercharge your SEO workflow.

How to claim: Email: [email protected] Subject: "SEOs Diners Club - Free Month"

Learn more about Semust | View pricing plans 

Want to Support This Newsletter?

I love sharing the latest developments and strategies from the SEO world with you. If you find my content useful, you can support me by buying a coffee. ☕ Click 'Buy Me a Coffee' to contribute to knowledge sharing. Let's achieve more together!

© 2022-2025 SEOs Diners Club by Mert Erkal