Watch: ChatGPT Keeps Its No-Search Top Pick in 7 of 10 Prompts
We asked ChatGPT 158 buyer questions with and without web search, three times each. The top pick matched 70% of the time. Search swaps about 2 brands in and 1.7 out per prompt, and about half of those swaps do not repeat.
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Does web search change which brands ChatGPT recommends? We asked it 158 buyer questions, like best project management software, three times without search and three times with it. In 7 of 10 prompts, the top pick stayed the same either way. In 110 of 158, the brand ChatGPT named first did not change. In the other 48, search moved the top spot. Project management went from Asana to ClickUp, HR software from BambooHR to Rippling, and keyword research from Ahrefs to Semrush. Some of that is ordinary variation. Two answers without search agree on the top pick 83 percent of the time. One answer with search and one without agree 66 percent of the time. Below the top pick, search swaps the list around. Per prompt, it adds about two brands and drops about 1.7. But more than half of those added brands showed up in only one of the three search runs. They come and go. So when you check your visibility in ChatGPT, test with search on and off, run each prompt more than once, and track the top spot on its own. The full study and the dataset are on organikpi.com.