After years of speculation, advertising in ChatGPT is now a reality. OpenAI, which had long maintained that its AI assistant would remain ad-free, has begun to change course — opening up a completely new marketing channel for businesses with over 800 million weekly users. At the same time, something even more fundamental is changing: the way customers search for products and services. More and more people are asking AI assistants instead of using Google—and brands that don’t appear in their responses simply don’t exist for these customers.
In this article, you’ll learn what we currently know about advertising on OpenAI, how advertising in AI assistants differs from traditional PPC, which keywords and topics companies will be targeting in this new era, how visibility optimization works in AI responses (GEO/AEO), and what specific steps your company can take today to be ready before the competition.
Why OpenAI Is Opening the Door to Advertising
The economics behind this decision are straightforward. Running large language models costs OpenAI billions of dollars a year, while the overwhelming majority of ChatGPT users use the free version. Subscriptions alone won’t cover these costs—and advertising is historically the most proven model for monetizing a mass audience, one that both Google and Meta have built.
The signs have been building up gradually: In 2025, OpenAI bolstered its leadership with managers who have experience in the advertising business (most notably with the arrival of Fidji Simo, the former CEO of Instacart, as CEO of Applications), launched shopping features directly within ChatGPT—including the ability to complete a purchase without leaving the conversation—and began publicly acknowledging that “tasteful” advertising could be part of the product. In late 2025 and early 2026, the first reports emerged about testing ad formats for users of the free version.
The key principle communicated by OpenAI: advertising should not influence the model’s responses themselves. Sponsored content should be separated and labeled—similar to paid search results —while organic responses remain independent. For companies, this creates two parallel strategies: paid advertising and organic visibility in AI responses. Those who master both will come out on top.
Market Context: ChatGPT Is Not Alone
OpenAI is the most visible player, but advertising in AI assistants is a broader trend:
- Perplexity launched sponsored follow-up questions and ad formats as early as the end of 2024 — making it the first major AI search engine to do so.
- Google has integrated ads into AI Overviews and AI Mode in search and is linking them to the existing Google Ads ecosystem.
- Microsoft is experimenting with ad formats in Copilot, including conversational and multimedia formats.
- Amazon, Meta, and TikTok are building their own AI shopping assistants with native monetization.
For marketers, this means that “AI advertising” will not be a single channel, but a new layer across the entire digital ecosystem —with its own rules for measurement, targeting, and creative.
How advertising in ChatGPT will likely work
The exact formats are still being finalized as of this writing, but a realistic picture can be sketched based on tests, announcements, and the product’s logic.
Expected Ad Formats
- Sponsored recommendations in answers: For commercial queries (“recommend a CRM for a small business”), a labeled sponsored result will appear next to the organic answer—similar to paid search results.
- Ads in shopping results: ChatGPT already displays product carousels with images, prices, and reviews for product-related queries. A sponsored placement in these results is the most natural first format — similar to Product Listing Ads.
- Sponsored follow-up questions: A model validated by Perplexity—a brand sponsors a question which the user can click on (“How to choose accounting software?” sponsored by a specific provider).
- Banner/display placements: Simpler formats outside the conversation itself, likely in the initial testing phase for free users.
- Transaction commissions: Not advertising in the strict sense, but a related model—OpenAI charges merchants a commission on purchases completed through ChatGPT (Instant Checkout). For e-commerce, this is already a viable channel today.
How AI Targeting Differs from Google Ads
A fundamental difference from traditional PPC: The AI assistant doesn’t just recognize a keyword, but the entire context of the conversation—and often the user’s history as well. If someone spends half an hour talking about starting a limited liability company, accounting, and their first employees, the assistant understands that this is a budding entrepreneur —without the person ever having typed that term. Targeting thus shifts from keywords to intentions and situations, which is both an opportunity (more precise targeting) and a challenge (less control and new privacy concerns) for advertisers.
The second difference: a conversation typically involves a single response, not a page with ten blue links. The number of ad positions will be significantly smaller than in classic search—and all the more valuable for it.
GEO and AEO: Organic Visibility in AI Responses
Paid advertising is only half the story. The other half—and for most companies today, the more important one—is the brand’s organic presence in AI assistant responses. This field has become established under the names GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), and is a natural extension of SEO.
How AI Assistants Choose Who to Mention
AI assistants combine two sources: knowledge from model training and live web search (ChatGPT Search, the Bing index, and proprietary crawlers). When a user asks a commercial question, the assistant typically searches current sources, selects the most reliable ones, and synthesizes a response with citations. For a company, this means: you must be present in the sources the AI draws from—and you must be citable.
GEO Optimization Principles for Businesses
- Answer questions directly: AI prefers content that answers a specific question clearly, in the first few sentences, without fluff. The question-and-answer format (FAQs, how-to guides, definitions) is ideal for citation.
- Build your brand’s entity: Consistent information about your company across the web, Wikipedia, directories, reviews, and industry media helps the model “recognize” the brand and associate it with the right topics.
- Structured data and technical foundation: Schema markup (Organization, Product, FAQPage), accessibility for AI crawlers (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot in robots.txt), a fast and clean website.
- Third-party citations: AI assistants cite comparison articles, rankings, reviews, and industry publications more frequently than average. Appearing in “best of” lists and independent reviews often has a greater impact on AI visibility than the website itself.
- Timeliness and Data: Content featuring specific numbers, studies, and dates is cited more frequently than general texts. GEO research (e.g., the academic study “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” from Princeton) shows that adding statistics, citations, and an authoritative tone measurably increases the chance of being included in an AI response.
- Measure AI visibility: A new discipline requires new metrics—the share of prompts in which the brand appears (AI share of voice), sentiment of mentions, cited sources, and traffic from AI assistants (referrals from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai) in analytics.
Keywords and Topics: What Companies Will Be Looking For
A new era brings a new search demand landscape. Below is an overview of keywords that companies and marketers are searching for in connection with AI advertising—keywords whose importance will grow—useful for planning both content and campaigns:
Advertising in AI (commercial queries):
- advertising in ChatGPT / ChatGPT ads / advertising in ChatGPT
- Advertising in OpenAI / OpenAI advertising
- How to Advertise in AI / Advertising in Artificial Intelligence
- Sponsored Results in AI Search
- Perplexity ads / advertising on Perplexity
- Ads in Google AI Overviews / AI Mode ads
- ChatGPT ad pricing / ChatGPT ads pricing
Organic visibility (GEO/AEO queries):
- How to appear in ChatGPT / How to get your business into ChatGPT
- GEO Optimization / Generative Engine Optimization
- AEO / Answer Engine Optimization
- AI SEO / SEO for Artificial Intelligence / LLM SEO
- Brand Visibility in AI
- Content Optimization for AI Search Engines
- How ChatGPT Selects Sources / Citations in AI Responses
- GPTBot robots.txt / AI crawlers
E-commerce and shopping with AI:
- shopping via ChatGPT / ChatGPT shopping
- Instant Checkout ChatGPT / Shopping in ChatGPT
- how to get products into ChatGPT / product feed for AI
- Agent-based commerce / agent-based shopping
Metrics and Strategy:
- How to Measure Traffic from ChatGPT / AI Referral Traffic
- Share of voice in AI / monitoring mentions in AI
- GEO tools / AI visibility tools
- Marketing strategy for the AI era
This presents a clear challenge for content strategy: companies that fill these topics with high-quality content first will capture demand the moment a niche topic becomes mainstream—just as was the case with SEO and PPC fifteen years ago.
What Your Company Can Do Today: A 6-Step Action Plan
There’s no need to wait for OpenAI to launch a self-service advertising platform. Build your head start now—mostly organically.
1. Find out what AI is saying about you today
Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot the questions your customers would ask: “best supplier of X in Slovakia,” “compare A and B,” “what is the experience with company Y.” Document whether you appear, in what light, and who the AI cites. This is your baseline.
2. Make your website accessible to AI crawlers
Check your robots.txt file—blocking GPTBot or OAI-SearchBot means your site won’t appear in ChatGPT Search. Add structured data (Organization, Product, FAQPage, Article) and make sure that key information is in the text, not in images or JavaScript, which the crawler cannot process.
3. Rewrite content as answers
Go through your most important pages and add direct answers to specific questions: FAQ sections, definitions, comparisons, and guides with numbers and data. Each page should be able to answer the question, “What prompt should this answer be used for?”.
4. Build mentions outside your own website
Map out comparison articles, rankings, and directories in your industry that AI assistants cite, and systematically work on establishing a presence in them—through PR, customer reviews, and expert content. In the AI era, digital PR is an integral part of SEO.
5. Prepare product data for AI commerce
If you sell online, maintain a clean product feed (names, parameters, prices, availability, reviews) and monitor programs like Instant Checkout and agency shopping protocols. Merchants with prepared data will be among the first to appear in AI shopping results.
6. Set up tracking and a budget reserve
In your analytics, track traffic from AI assistants, monitor its growth, and analyze conversion trends. At the same time, set aside an experimental budget in your 2026 media plan for the first AI ad formats—early testing will yield data and know-how while auctions are still inexpensive and competition is low.
B2B vs. B2C: Different Strategies for the AI Era
Preparing for advertising and visibility in the AI era varies by business type—and it’s worth taking this into account before copying a one-size-fits-all guide.
Strategy for B2C and E-commerce
Consumer queries in AI assistants are predominantly product-related and comparative: “best robot vacuum under 400 euros,” “compare these three mattresses,” “a gift for a five-year-old.” Product data, reviews, and price are the deciding factors here—the AI assistant acts as an extremely fast comparison tool that reads dozens of reviews on the user’s behalf. Priorities for e-commerce sites: a flawless product feed, systematic collection of reviews, presence in comparison articles, and readiness for transactional formats like Instant Checkout. The first ad formats in ChatGPT will almost certainly be shopping-related—B2C brands should be ready to be among the first to test them.
Strategy for B2B and Services
B2B inquiries are consultative and more in-depth: “how to choose an ERP for a manufacturing company with 200 employees,” “Compare approaches to cloud migration,” “How much does CRM implementation cost?” Here, the AI assistant delves deeply into the purchasing research that used to take place on vendors’ websites and in phone calls with sales representatives. Priority for B2B: thought leadership that can be cited by AI assistants—expert articles with data, case studies with figures, transparent pricing frameworks, and a presence in industry rankings and analyses. A brand that AI consistently mentions during the research phase enters the selection process with a significant head start—even before the sales representative picks up the phone.
How Much Will It Cost: Budget Considerations for 2026
Exact advertising rate cards for ChatGPT do not yet exist, but based on market logic, it is already possible to plan a budget. Experience with Perplexity and the first AI advertising programs suggests that the initial formats will be—a limited number of ad slots and the novelty of the channel will drive prices up, just as they do in the early stages of any new platform. A realistic approach for medium and large companies: set aside 5 to 10 percent of the digital budget as an experimental reserve for AI channels and direct the rest of the investment toward organic readiness—GEO audits, content, and data that work regardless of when and in what form the advertising platform arrives.
An important historical parallel: companies that tested Google AdWords between 2002 and 2004 gained years of cheap conversions and know-how that competitors had to catch up to at great cost. AI advertising is at a similar point today—the costs of early experimentation are small compared to the value of the head start.
How to Measure Success: New Metrics for AI Marketing
Traditional metrics (search rankings, CTR, CPC) aren’t enough in the AI era. Build a three-layer measurement framework:
- Visibility: the proportion of relevant prompts in which your brand appears (AI share of voice), position in the response (first mention vs. peripheral), sentiment, and accuracy of brand information. Measure these by regularly testing a set of prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot—either manually or via specialized GEO tools.
- Traffic: referral traffic from AI assistant domains in analytics, its trends, and behavior (AI visitors tend to have a higher conversion rate—they arrive pre-qualified by the response).
- Business impact: conversions and leads with an AI assistant in the customer journey; the question “How did you hear about us?” in forms and during sales calls now includes the option “ChatGPT/AI recommended you to me.”
Without baseline metrics today, you won’t be able to evaluate the impact of any future investment—whether in content or in initial campaigns.
Risks and Open Questions
An honest assessment also requires looking at the other side of the coin. AI advertising raises questions that don’t yet have definitive answers: where exactly the line between organic responses and sponsored content will be drawn, and whether users will trust it; how it will be verified that advertising does not influence the model’s recommendations; how European regulations (GDPR, DSA, AI Act); and how will brand safety mechanisms function in an environment where the response is generated by a model, not by an editorial team. Companies should keep an eye on these issues—and, for their first campaigns, demand transparent reporting from platforms just as rigorously as they do for traditional channels.
Sources and Recommended Reading
This topic is evolving rapidly, so we recommend following primary sources: OpenAI’s official blog and announcements (openai.com/news) regarding ad tests, Instant Checkout, and the Agentic Commerce Protocol; coverage by the Financial Times, Reuters, and The Information on OpenAI’s monetization strategy; OpenAI’s documentation on the GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot crawlers; Google’s announcements regarding ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode; the Perplexity blog regarding its advertising program; and the academic study “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” (Aggarwal et al., Princeton/KDD 2024) as a starting point for optimizing content for generative search engines. Before making any decisions, verify specific details about ad formats and availability in current official sources—this area changes on a weekly basis.
Frequently Asked Questions About Advertising in ChatGPT and OpenAI
When will advertising in ChatGPT be available to regular businesses?
OpenAI has begun testing ad formats with free users; a full-fledged self-service platform for advertisers has not yet been announced, and the rollout will likely be phased—starting with major partners and expanding later. Check OpenAI’s official announcements for exact dates.
Will advertising influence the answers ChatGPT provides?
The stated principle is that it won’t—sponsored content is to be separated and labeled, while organic responses remain independent. Only real-world operation will show how this plays out in practice and how users will perceive it; for brands, this is this is a reason to invest in organic AI visibility alongside advertising.
How can I get my business into ChatGPT’s answers right now?
Organically: Make your website accessible to AI crawlers, structure your content into direct answers, build mentions and reviews on websites that AI cites, and maintain consistent brand information. This is the discipline of GEO/AEO—and it works today, without waiting for an advertising platform.
Is it still worth investing in traditional SEO?
Yes—GEO is built directly on SEO. AI assistants draw from the web index, so a technically sound website with high-quality content is your ticket to both worlds. The emphasis is shifting: from chasing rankings toward citability, entities, and presence in trustworthy sources.
What should an e-shop do if it wants to sell through ChatGPT?
Maintain a high-quality product feed, collect reviews, offer competitive prices, and monitor agent-based shopping programs (Instant Checkout, Agentic Commerce Protocol). Shopping recommendations in ChatGPT are organic and drawn from web data—so the accuracy of product information is crucial.
Prepare Your Brand for the AI Era Before Your Competition Does
Advertising on OpenAI and visibility in AI assistants aren’t just a thing of the future — the first formats are being tested, and customers are already asking AI questions today. Companies that map out their AI visibility now, prepare their content and data, and set up metrics will be steps ahead of the market once the advertising platform is fully launched. If you want to find out how your brand is faring and develop a strategy for AI search and future advertising, contact us—you’ll receive a customized action plan within 48 hours.
