OpenAI’s ChatGPT is about to get an upgrade with the introduction of plugin support. This will open up a world of possibilities for anyone looking to scale their business operations and marketing campaigns. With this new capability comes the potential for ChatGPT to do things like browse the internet for information not in its model, go shopping and more.
Plus, OpenAI has proprietary and third-party plugins that you can use right off the bat.
So let’s take a look at questions surrounding this topic like what is artificial general intelligence, what these plugins can do and how they’ll help your SEO and other digital marketing efforts.
Going Beyond Its Training Data
Described as the eyes and ears for language models, plugins enable ChatGPT to access information that is not included in its training data because they’re either too recent, too personal or too specific.
This added layer of information helps the model produce more accurate and reliable answers.
For example, if you ask ChatGPT about what’s going to happen in a movie you haven’t seen yet, it can pull the plot summary from IMDb using its plugin support. Or, if you want to see what kind of discounts are available on a specific product, it can look up the price from various online retailers.
However, since plugin support is still in its alpha stage, very few people will be able to take advantage of its capabilities. Furthermore, its ability to augment your workflow is still severely limited because of security and privacy issues that may arise.
Who Can Access ChatGPT Plugins Right Now?
Currently, ChatGPT is only available to a few developers who have already created their own plugins, including:
• Expedia
• FiscalNote
• Zapier
• Slack
Here’s a complete list of third-party plugins available during launch:
If you’re not a developer, you can still access ChatGPT plugins if you subscribe to OpenAI’s paid service, ChatGPT Plus. You can also try to join their waitlist to be one of the first users and developers to receive plugin support once they become more widely accessible in the future.
How To Use ChatGPT Plugins
You can use ChatGPT Plugins by installing your desired plugins from their Store right at the start of a new conversation with ChatGPT. You can then proceed to ask the Chat GPT AI chatbot for information that could make use of these plugins.
And since this AI GPT chatbot is all about interfacing conversationally with users, you can still run conversational prompts, and ChatGPT will do all the work for you, such as executing tasks and activating these plugins.
ChatGPT Plugins
Currently, ChatGPT has three of its own plugins that can execute different tasks when installed. Let’s explore these plugins below.
Browsing
Using Bing’s Search API, this plugin allows ChatGPT to browse the internet for more recent information beyond its training data and cite the sources for accuracy and verification. This helps the OpenAI GPT 4 model produce more accurate and reliable answers to its questions.
The Browsing plugin also has the added benefit of helping ChatGPT develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) aligned with human values and intent.
What Is Artificial General Intelligence?
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is basically AI that has the ability to learn and understand intellectual tasks that animals and humans can. This is the main aim for AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
By gathering information from a variety of sources, the Chat GPT AI chatbot can learn how different people are thinking about topics and respond with more nuanced answers. This can help create a more realistic conversational AI experience for users.
Also, “With access to the internet, ChatGPT will be able to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and developments in various industries, which will enable it to produce more relevant and valuable content resulting in better search engine rankings,” said Don Gruspe, Thrive’s Demand Generation SEO Specialist.
To prevent accessing sensitive information, website admins can include ChatGPT-User in their robots.txt file and decide if they want their content to be crawled by ChatGPT-User.
ChatGPT-User is the Browsing plugin’s user-agent token that is designed to follow the rules outlined in your website’s robots.txt file. If you choose to disable access to your website, then the AI GPT chatbot output will return this error message:
Take note that ChatGPT-User will only crawl websites if you ask it to and never in an automatic fashion. The AI GPT chatbot synthesizes the information they found on their search to give you a more grounded response.
Code Interpreter
Using Python as a programming language, Code Interpreter enables Chat GPT AI chatbot to execute convoluted coding tasks, such as:
• Logical calculations
• Upload and download files
• Solve quantitative and qualitative mathematical problems
• Do data analysis and visualization
• Convert files between formats
This added capability makes it possible for OpenAI GPT 4 to interpret more complex tasks and create a more realistic conversational AI experience for users since the model can now understand code and answer questions related to it.
Moreover, Code Interpreter has security measures in place to ensure that no harmful effects are caused outside of the sandboxed environment. All data interpretation is made within a sandboxed mode with network and resource limitations for each session.
Self-Hosted Knowledge Base Retrieval Plugin
Another ChatGPT Plugin is the Knowledge Base Retrieval tool, which allows users to access their personal and organizational information to obtain the most relevant document snippets from their data sources.
Some information pools it can access include:
• Files
• Emails
• Public documentation
Since this plugin is open-source and self-hosted, developers can create their own version of the plugin and register it with ChatGPT. This allows them to customize the plugin according to their needs while still taking advantage of its AI chatbot GPT features.
This plugin “provides content creators with a range of options to utilize ChatGPT to extract valuable information from their organization’s knowledge base and other relevant documents,” said Gruspe.
Some of its capabilities “include creating aggregates and tables of data to summarize key findings or identify trends, as well as retrieving specific pieces of information to incorporate into their content.”
Because of this plugin, content creators can now create more accurate and informative content backed by research and data, Gruspe said.
The Knowledge Base Retrieval Plugin also has built-in security measures that prevent any malicious actors from accessing sensitive material stored in their database.
Third-Party Plugins
If you’re up to the task, you can develop your own AI chatbot GPT plugins and register them with ChatGPT. However, you still need to have a sufficient level of understanding in building plugin code to do this.
Alternatively, you can visit the ChatGPT Plugin Store and browse through their list of available plugins to see if any work for your use case.
Because of their versatility, third-party plugins “can significantly enhance ChatGPT’s functionality by allowing developers and users to customize the platform to their specific needs,” said Ken Romero, Thrive’s SEO Strategist.
Furthermore, “This feature can integrate ChatGPT into existing workflows and systems, increasing productivity and efficiency,” said Romero.
Currently, plugins can only call for backend APIs, which means they are limited in their ability to interact with the model. In the future, ChatGPT plans on releasing more robust plugins that can call for client-side APIs and allow for more in-depth interaction with the model.
The Future of AI SEO and Content Marketing
The abilities of AI chatbot GPT are rapidly expanding, and the introduction of plugins into the model will impact content writing, creation and marketing workflows.
While there are still a few ChatGPT plugins right now, it’s not far-fetched to expect that more conversational AI plugins will be developed as competition heats up and more developers start contributing to the ecosystem and joining AI trends.
Content creators will benefit from this increase in OpenAI GPT 4 plugins since they can create more complex content quickly with just a single prompt.
So, what can we look forward to in this development and will there be a huge impact on how AI affects SEO? Here’s our take.
SEO-Driven Plugins
We like to imagine SEO companies such as Ahrefs, SurferSEO and SEMrush taking full advantage of ChatGPT’s plugin feature. After all, they had already developed desktop-based extensions and SEO AI plugins that allow them to display, write and analyze SEO content in real time.
These companies can likely leverage their existing resources to develop a comprehensive SEO AI plugin allowing users to easily create SEO-optimized content with ChatGPT.
Companies can leverage third-party plugins to “create new use cases for ChatGPT, such as integrating it with Ahrefs for data-driven SEO strategies,” Romero said.
We see that type of AI tech integration already happening with Jasper and SurferSEO, so it’s only a matter of time until we see similar AI tech plugins from other companies.
How AI affects SEO will depend on your ability to integrate the technology into your operations. If you’re already leveraging AI SEO tools and plugins, then Open AI ChatGPT is a great way to expand those capabilities further.
We already outlined from our ChatGPT prompt guide how to use ChatGPT to produce comprehensive SEO AI keyword and content ideation plans and strategies. SEO-driven ChatGPT plugins can fetch data right from your SEO database to elevate these already powerful keyword strategies and content ideation prompts.
More Accurate Data and Time-Sensitive Content
Another mind blowing feature we expect to see soon is the ability to tap into real-time data like stock prices and news. We already see this with their Browsing plugin, which can access the Internet through Bing’s Search API and third-party plugins like FiscalNote and Expedia.
This is great because one significant limitation of language models like ChatGPT is that their output depends on their training data up to a certain point in time. For instance, OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model only finished training in early 2022. This means that any data that has been released since then will be inaccessible to the model and will not be included in its predictions.
However, with the Browsing and third-party plugins, users can now access real-time data, allowing OpenAI ChatGPT to produce more accurate, localized and time-sensitive content.
If, in the past, you still had to put more context in your prompts to produce accurate content, recent AI trends enable you to scour the web for the latest news and information. Additionally, you can easily leverage future plugins by some of the best companies in the world to fetch data from their websites.
Safeguarding Your Own Content and Website
ChatGPT’s Internet access and other AI tech capabilities are raising some concerns about privacy, security and consent. One solution that OpenAI ChatGPT introduced at launch is its user agent token which you can restrict access to some of your website’s content.
Of course, this would mean that other websites and publications could also restrict access to their content, making it difficult to create updated and timely content for your campaigns and marketing information that rely on them.
AI trends will most likely involve protecting intellectual properties with the rise of AI SEO tools and increasing artificial intelligence chatbot capabilities.
Scale Your Marketing Efforts With Thrive
The promise of ChatGPT’s plugin feature is something that everyone (especially the prompt and AI SEO enthusiasts) should be excited about.
With the increasing availability of artificial intelligence chatbot plugins, users can expect to see even more powerful integrations with their favorite applications and services.
Now, you don’t have to settle for generic content with ChatGPT’s ability to fetch real-time data and aggregate them in more ways than before. These plugins eliminate the need for manual research and make content creation faster, easier and more efficient.
If you feel like you’re not making the most out of these capabilities, reach out to Thrive Internet Marketing Agency now and scale your content creation for business growth.
Thrive offers a wide range of digital marketing and content creation solutions for any business size, from startups to enterprises. Turn your campaigns into an automated and data-driven process with Thrive!
