ChatGPT Just Showed Me Why Generative Search is the Future

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Why LLM Search is the Future

Yesterday, I said that I detest April Fools Day. I’ll just put that out there as a little tease/spoiler.

Now, this morning I was doom-scrolling Google Discover (as one does), and saw an article pop up from the Johns Hopkins Newsletter (a legit campus publication) saying that my alma mater was joining the Ivy League.

Cool, I thought. I get to say that I went to an Ivy League school! I read the article and dug a bit deeper.

Of course, it turned out that the story was an April Fools prank. Johns Hopkins is not in the Ivy League, and probably never will be.

That’s according to reality. But not according to Google.

Again, the story showed up in my Discover feed, which means Google felt it was real enough to push out to me. But if you search “Johns Hopkins Ivy League” or even just “Johns Hopkins News,” the story appears prominently at the top of Google.

It’s also repeated in various aggregated stories picked up by other outlets, and (of course) in a Reddit post that ranks #3 on the page.

Why?

Google processes the web by looking at things like the reputation of a site, the number of links it has, and how much users interact with a specific article. It assumes that if a legit site publishes a legit looking article and lots of people click on the article, it must be legit.

But in this case, Google is wrong. It doesn’t actually read and understand the article. So it doesn’t get that the story is a work of satire.

LLM powered search, though, is totally different. Here’s a video I made about it (you can watch directly on YouTube too):

Ask ChatGPT Search for “Johns Hopkins News”, and the fake article is nowhere to be found.

Ask it specifically “Is Johns Hopkins joining the Ivy League?” and is provides a very clear, accurate paragraph about the April Fool’s article, putting it into context:

In short, ChatGPT gets the joke, because it actually read and understood the article, rather than just regurgitating it onto my results page because it had a bunch of links and came from a reputable domain.

Now, most examples of information retrieval and inaccurate information aren’t as clearcut at this. But the edge case of a reputable publication publishing a (benign) piece of misinformation shines a light on generative search’s huge advantage.

Again, generative search engines like ChatGPT Search and Perplexity actually read and understand the articles they’re surfacing.

They also have world knowledge they can draw on—for example, ChatGPT seems to know that Johns Hopkins does this every year, so it can put the satirical article into its broader context and realized it was a joke.

That lets the system spot obvious pieces of satire. But in everyday operations, it likely means that generative search engines are better than the traditional kind at truly understanding and accurately processing the content they surface.

That should make them more resistant to content spam, manipulation by shady black-hat SEO techniques, and good old fashioned real life misinformation.

Generative search, in short, is starting to get better than traditional search at wading through the sea of crap that the modern Internet is fast becoming, and yanking from that morass the little nuggets of genuinely useful information.

No wonder Google is taking an “If you can’t beat them, join them” approach, and plunking a generative experience at the top of its search page with its new AI Mode.

I was skeptical before. But what I saw today has me convinced: generative search is the future. We should all start preparing our sites and content for that reality.