Why would Google artificially boost it? They're competing. They shouldn't give it any special treatment whatsoever

Are they? Have you tried Gemini lately? They might be competing on the services side, but the only two peer competitors in the chatbot space are Anthropic and OpenAI.

They do have a chat ui. It's not as robust afaik, but I don't see why they can't expand on it. It would be a nice addition to their storage/Google one offering

Are you suggesting that chatgpt is as popular as it is because it's propped up by google in the serps?

I think they're suggesting that highly popular sites like ChatGPT get a ranking boost beyond regular page rank, making SEO efforts unnecessary.

But I don’t think that’s the case, at least not artificially. These sites tend to rise naturally in search rankings because they have a huge volume of links and media coverage. Which still makes SEO efforts unnecessary.