OpenAI’s latest model is trained to be intelligent, not knowledgeable.
Wait, what?
Yup. You read that right.
- GPT-5 simply doesn’t know as many things which other, often much smaller models, do.
- This is a model trained to be logical, intelligent and handle its tools well.
- Its weights do not contain all of world’s information.
- It’s weights are trained to handle the information passed to it.
- This is clearly a deliberate design choice and a brilliant move by OpenAI.
Here’s an example:
Now, you may think this is some pretty esoteric knowledge not broadly relevant to most end users and you’re right. But here’s a tiny, open source model from Google, Gemma 3 4B, just knowing this fact, no dramas, no grounding:
Now look what happens when grounding is on for GPT-5:
Now the difference between the two models is vast, Gemma is so small it can run on your computer or even a phone, while GPT-5 is a behemoth in comparison.
What’s this to do with SEO?
In case the coffee didn’t kick in yet. Let me spell it out for you, OpenAI, the leader in AI assistant space, made an executive decision to focus on raw intelligence and leave the rest to search engines.
Without grounding this model is virtually useless. It’s designed to be the brain on top of tools and information it’s provided with.
This means SEO has never been more relevant than now.
From the community:
This move makes more sense. It’s more about connecting the dots, search, find and relate information rather than spitting out knowledge that is alert out there. In this era, information gain is the new king.
The new model relies on grounding (web search) and other tools to be accurate – it’s not inherently trained on all the world’s information because… we already have search for that.
The grounding approach makes way more sense than training everything from scratch. Google’s been moving towards real-time data integration for years anyway. GPT-5 using web search as a foundation actually validates what we’ve been saying about quality content and proper SEO fundamentals. If anything, this reinforces that being well-referenced and citeable is gonna be even more important going forward.
The thing is, LLM limitations are clear. What we now call a “model” is really a powerhouse of tools — and the retriever layer is what makes the difference. We’ve seen it with Gemini’s in_context_url: the model is static, while retrieval distills and synthesizes the web.
Also reasoning improves when the model’s inputs are hyper-curated. It doesn’t need Streamlit docs — unless they hold a new idea or a core knowledge pillar. With GPT-5, we’re seeing a new breed of models — but the retrieval layer hasn’t been upgraded.
Agree – I was noticing how poor their gpt-oss model was without tools and how powerful it was with it. Models don’t need to know all information, they just need to know how to access it, parse it, and make sense of it. Especially with how often “knowledge” changes.
Anyone trying to use API data instead of scraping results take note. The model response without tools is notably worse. If you want to benchmark visibility this way, chances are accuracy is just going to suffer.
This is an interesting decision by OpenAI, leaving the uploading of articles and the indexing process to search engines.
l often wonder if the general public should know more about LLMs and their limitations, but I don’t think they actually know about search engines beyond searching for info either. The truth is that they don’t seem to care either.
GPT-5 without sonic_berry to trigger a web search is “virtually useless”. And to be fair I too sensed that the model without tools is mid… Dan makes a great point – “models don’t need to know all information, they just need to know how to access it, parse it, and make sense of it”.
Our job as SEO is very much relevant because it’s our duty set up the table for LLMs to feast.
What do you see as the new competitive advantage for brands, is it in controlling the sources LLMs retrieve from, shaping the retrievers themselves, or influencing the grounding process?
The interfaces might change but the basic concept of creating valuable information and having people find it isn’t going anywhere. What counts as “valuable information” is where the battle lines have been drawn.
Leave a Reply