Greetings Organic Humans,
With the new ChatGPT built-in search feature, one must ask, is optimizing your career site to capture more AI-driven candidate traffic possible? Should we worry about it now or wait to see what happens? And are the AI-powered robots going to be benevolent leaders? OK, that last one might be premature. However, Buyer Advertising does have answers to the first two questions, and we are optimistic about the third one but are still preparing contingency plans.
Here is the reality.
- ChatGPT (and its brethren) still uses conventional spiders to index content from the web.
- The chat interfaces can now link directly to third-party websites, including specific job posting pages.
- Links generated by ChatGPT contain a conventional utm_source of “chatgpt.com” and many other AI search models, including Gemini, Perplexity, and Phind, will pass along referrer data so this traffic can be identified (DeepSeek and Claude unfortunately do not).
Even though AI is conducting the search, SEO fundamentals still reign supreme. These include the importance of high-quality, organized, evergreen content, logical URL structures and site maps, semantic HTML and content tags, accessibility, load speed, and mobile responsiveness, just to name a few of the strategies used by leading career sites today – of course all Buyer Talent Engine clients :-).
One area of opportunity we see is tailoring your career site content to offer answers to common conversational queries based on the propensity of ChatGPT questions (think FAQs page). As additional data is collected, there will be more actionable strategies to boost visibility with the AI search models if you know where to look.
With that said, the good news is that if your career site already applies all the best SEO practices today, then you are prepared for the growing AI-generated candidate search traffic tomorrow. The bad news is that most ATS-powered career sites lack these fundamental SEO practices, putting your organization at a significant disadvantage, regardless of AI.
At Buyer Advertising, we are keeping a close eye on how AI is reshaping job search behavior and actively gathering, analyzing, and developing strategies based on data patterns identified with our Buyer Talent Engine enhanced source analytics. Contact us to learn how we can future-proof your recruiting strategy today because tomorrow is just around the corner.
Joel Glick, Managing Partner
Buyer Advertising