Why I Stopped Relying on ChatGPT for Job Searches

When I was deep in the job hunt, I started using ChatGPT to help me surface opportunities. At first, it was pulling listings from a variety of sources. But pretty quickly, I noticed a pattern: almost every result was coming from SEOJobs.com. It was like ChatGPT had made up its mind—this was the job board for me.

And to be honest, it wasn’t wrong. I ended up going directly to SEOJobs.com myself, and I started finding better listings, faster. That’s when I realized something important: ChatGPT had essentially trained me to refine my own process. It exposed me to a valuable niche resource I might not have prioritized otherwise.

But it also got me thinking about how AI search tools pull data in the first place.

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On its search page, ChatGPT even states, “We also partnered with news and data providers to add up-to-date information and new visual designs for categories like weather, stocks, sports, news, and maps.” That made me wonder how much of its search behavior is influenced by these kinds of partnerships.

I’ve read that ChatGPT's search results often match Bing’s—which makes sense given the underlying integration. Gemini (Google’s AI) taps into Google Search, while Perplexity uses its own crawler, PerplexityBot. Since Perplexity essentially built its own search engine from scratch, its results often feel a bit more limited. It’s not the full internet. It’s a curated slice.

Which brings me to a bigger point. When people say, “This AI didn’t answer my question,” what they’re really saying is that the AI didn’t interpret the question the way they wanted. That’s not necessarily a flaw in the tech—it’s a reminder that prompts still require a human touch.

Whether your question should be broad, specific, long-tail, or filtered depends on what you're trying to achieve. And unless you explicitly ask an LLM to cast a wide net, it’s probably going to give you a pretty focused set of results.

AI is powerful. But it’s still a tool. How well it works depends on how well we use it.

Just my two cents.

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