I Opened the Network Tab. Here’s What ChatGPT Was Doing.

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Intro #

SEO is not dead, but AI is definitely a big part of it now. Clicks are not dead either, but they do not really fully reflect/capture the value both traditional search and AI platforms bring to your businesses.

I mean look at brand mentions. Your brand can be recommended, users can see it, later go to google and perform a navigational search to find your website. Or if they’re already familiar with your website (e.g amazon) and realize there’s no better place to get what they need, they can just go back via direct traffic. You may also end up getting traffic as a referral from one of the cited sources.

For example:

I monitor my newsletter and brand status on different AI platforms. I recently checked ChatGPT for “top indie seo newsletters” and I came out on top with two cited sources, none of them is my website. People will see my website name and either go to one of those sources and look for a link to my newsletter, or manually search Google for “SEO Riddler Sara Taher” for example to find my website. So people will come to your website via organic channels in new ways that mere clicks may not account for.

I think this is a big reason why we have not yet seen many people talking about how much ChatGPT is sending traffic to their websites.

So yeah, definitely fun times in SEO! And because of how important getting mentioned/cited in ChatGPT is becoming, this brings us to today’s newsletter topic: what happens when you prompt ChatGPT?

Let’s dissect that… not in a theoretical way, but what I actually saw happening!

The Network Tab #

I really want everyone to play around with this, so here’s what to do. Before prompting chatgpt, right click and select “inspect”.

Next you write your prompt, it can be anything really for me I typed “best crochet yarn for beginners in canada”

You’ll see things starting to populate in the inspect window that you opened, click on network, find the conversation, then click on EventStream.

You can always copy and paste this to chatgpt or claude to explain to you everything! This object captures the moment chatgpt decides it needs to search the web for your query.

The Conversation Anatomy #

When you look at the text in EventStream, you get something like this:

{
  "v": {
    "message": {
      "id": "2cc91a19-092d-4735-a0d4-3c6581736af9",
      "author": {
        "role": "tool",
        "name": "web.run",
        "metadata": { "real_author": "tool:web.run" }
      },
      "create_time": 1788831562.9684362,
      "content": {
        "content_type": "text",
        "parts": [""]
      },
      "status": "finished_successfully",
      "metadata": {
        "search_model_queries": {
          "type": "search_model_queries",
          "queries": ["best yarn for crochet beginners Canada worsted weight acrylic cotton Bernat Caron"]
        },
        "reasoning_titles": ["Searching best yarn for crochet beginners Canada worsted weight acrylic cotton Bernat Caron"],
        "reasoning_status": "is_reasoning",
        "tool_icons": ["globe"],
        "reasoning_start_time": 1788831561.9985478,
        "model_slug": "gpt-5-6-mini",
        "model_adjustments": ["auto:smaller_model:reached_message_cap"],
        "parent_id": "d5410723-6ee6-4435-938e-1558808447f0",
        "turn_exchange_id": "6a85u2bb-37cc-1155-a3b4-1625056f1268"
      },
      "recipient": "all"
    },
    "conversation_id": "6a9f673e-e3b8-83e9-8d7d-5b48e139ae34"
  },
  "c": 9
}

so what is happening here? This conversation happens everytime chatgpt decides it needs to search the web during an interaction with the user.

This conversation shows:

• The author: can be the user (you), the AI, or a helper tool that the AI can ask to do things for it like searching Google. This shows that the AI doesn’t search the web itself. It basically says “hey search tool, go look this up for me” and then waits for the answer. Why is this important? it shows that information retrieval (IR) is a separate algorithm than the LLM, optimizing for IR can be different and Google/Bing-like compared to LLMs.
• search_model_queries: THIS is the actual useful information, because it’s the exact words the AI typed into the search engine tool it is using. In our example, the AI typed “best yarn for crochet beginners Canada worsted weight acrylic cotton Bernat Caron” so it included most popular brands and yarn types as well.

Interesting note: I tried prompting “best icecream stores near me” and do the same analysis, turns out chatgpt has a separate search tool for local queries called “map_search_model_queries” instead of the “search_model_queries” I mentioned above.

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄) #

I really hope this newsletter edition helps you explore ChatGPT and how it works closer. And it’s not just about the query fan outs.

As you can see, the query sent by ChatGPT to search the web can include pre-decided brand names, or specific product types for example.

I always knew that search is a separate functionality/algorithm than the LLM itself. Getting cited in an LLM relies on whether this system can find you. Definitely something we should keep in mind when thinking of optimizing for this new era!

That’s that for today folks and see you in the next newsletter!

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Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.