OpenAI has been serving up ads to free tier ChatGPT users in the US for over a month now, and early testing suggests they’re more common and more targeted than most users might expect.
How often do they appear? In a test of 500 questions on the mobile app, about one in five questions in the new chat thread triggered an ad below the ChatGPT answer – always as a website link button, which always matched the question title.
What kind of ads appeared. The scope is wide – dog food, hotel reservations, productivity software, travel vacations, streaming services, corporate credit cards, AI coding tools, and basketball tickets, among others. Travel inquiries resulted in more advertisements; asking for help planning a trip to Palm Springs turned up a Booking.com ad that automatically searched for hotels in the area.
Powerful “poaching”. When the query mentioned a product by name — DoorDash or Netflix, for example — the ad that appeared was sometimes for a direct competitor. Marketing experts describe this as the long-term foundation of digital marketing that is now moving to AI.
Why do we care. ChatGPT ads appear approximately once every five questions in the free segment, with insight based on the topic of conversation and memory – which makes it a channel for emerging marketers to watch out for, especially given the power of “poaching” that allows brands to appear against what competitors are saying, a tactic that has already been proven in search marketing.
What OpenAI says.
- Ads do not affect ChatGPT responses
- Full chat content is not shared with advertisers
- Ad targeting is based on the subject of the query, previous conversations, and anything ChatGPT has stored in memory about the user
- Early signals indicate low ad abandonment rates and no impact on consumer loyalty metrics
A paradox. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called ads “the last resort” in 2024, saying the mix of “ads and AI is a unique disruptor.” The company is now expanding the rollout to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand after testing it in the US.
Big picture. Neither Google’s Gemini nor Anthropic’s Claude currently have sponsored ad buttons in the results – although Google has said it is not withdrawing that. OpenAI is essentially pioneering a new ad format, and how it handles the balance between monetization and user trust will change whether AI advertising becomes a sustainable industry or a cautionary tale.
Noted. Digital marketer Glenn Gabe, shared on X how ads are displayed on mobile and confirmed that they are not displayed on Plus accounts.
An important point. For advertisers, ChatGPT’s ad inventory is becoming a reality, although it is still far from showing ROI. However the credibility of the platform depends entirely on whether users feel that the ads are ruining the experience. That’s a discrepancy worth watching closely as the release scales.
Celebrate deeply. Ask Me ChatGPT 500 Questions. Here are the Ads I See Most – Wired (subscription required).
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