Who is advertising on ChatGPT and how might this new ad channel change advertising?

57% of consumers say they trust brands more when they use AI. If consumers put more trust in brands using AI then could they potentially put more trust in ads shown on AI channels rather than search or social? 

As of early 2026, ChatGPT is testing formal, widespread ad campaigns across the platform. The company announced in a recent press release that they'll start testing ads for free-tier and "ChatGPT Go" users across the U.S — which launched on February 9th. 

Since 2020, conversational AI has jumped in value from $5 billion in 2020 to over $14 billion. The graphics processing units used to power AI demand huge amounts of power, making them expensive to run. This means that developers can’t use subscription fees alone to cover their expenses. Ads deliver sustainable monetization, allowing ChatGPT to scale as their user base grows.

While Sam Altman once said ads would be a last resort, it seems that OpenAI’s ad-free philosophy can no longer support its $1.4 trillion spending commitments. Altman notes his caution on sharing ads on the platform, stating his intention to carefully balance the platform's expense needs with protecting the user experience, he says: "We haven't done any advertising yet. I kind of...I mean, I'm not totally against it," Altman said on OpenAI's podcast. "I can point to areas where I like ads. I think ads on Instagram, kinda cool. I bought a bunch of stuff from them. But I think it'd be very hard to — I mean, take a lot of care to get right."

ChatGPT advertising isn't fully open — advertising is still limited, experimental and being rolled out gradually by Altman in the U.S., but the early-stage rollout will give us one of our first looks into the effectiveness of conversational advertising. 

In this post, I'll take a look at the first ChatGPT advertisers, how advertising currently works on ChatGPT and explore how intent-based advertising is likely to influence the ad industry. 

OpenAI is testing out conversational ads with select partners predominantly in the travel, hospitality and consumer goods industries. 

They're trialing targeted, utility focused and context-aware sponsored results for unpaid users, presenting these ads in a separate text box in response to user prompts. For example, a user asking for advice on the best diet to feed their cat may be shown relevant brand suggestions with a CTA that directs them to a product landing page. 

“As analysts have already pointed out, AI-generated answers are becoming a new visibility layer rather than a traffic channel. In other words, the ad is not there to win the click. It’s there to support a decision already forming. That changes what ‘good’ looks like. Creative will matter more than bidding. Relevance will matter more than reach. Brands that add clarity will outperform brands that add noise.”

- Alice Baker, Senior SEO Executive Sierra Six Media Limited

In a similar vein as Google Search ads, the ads are simple and text-based with small images. However, unlike traditional search or social media ads, ads are featured in a conversational context — giving the feel of a recommendation from a colleague or friend. While social ads and Google ads can often feel like they disrupt the user’s experience, ChatGPT’s ads attempt to support consumers’ end goal — whether they want to plan a trip or find the right low-cal soda for them.

As OpenAI's advertising strategy is in its earliest stages, unlike Google Ads or Meta, the platform doesn't currently offer an open sign-up or self-serve dashboard on ChatGPT. Ad placements are currently gatekept. Every prospective ChatGPT advertising partner must go through a review by OpenAI's internal applications team. 

Observed brands and categories

Early reports suggest that contextual ad placements will feature four core categories: 

1. Travel and hospitality: British Airways, Expedia and Marriott Bonvoy. Think: airport transfers, specific hotels, affordable flights. Travel and hospitality brands are providing recommendations and curated next steps to help users plan their travel. Featured ads mid-process milestones like, “Double your points by booking an inclusive package.”

2. Retail and ecommerce: Amazon, Walmart and Ikea. Retail and ecommerce ads will appear following prompts that suggest users are in the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey and are comparing brand options.

3. CPGs: Coca-Cola and Johnson & Johnson. Big-name CPGs as well as sustainable local brands are triggered by lifestyle context. For example, a consumer asking for advice on how to host their first dinner party may see a contextual ad for Pepsi products.

4. B2B SaaS: Salesforce and HubSpot. B2B SaaS brands are offering free product trials to users as recommended tools to help them achieve their business goals.

Conversation context and intent signals

ChatGPT actively tracks and interprets intent signals and attempts to provide ads that closely align with the user’s intent and supports their end goal. After a user enters their initial prompt, ChatGPT asks relevant follow-up questions to determine whether the user is in: 

1. Explore mode: Looking to get inspiration

2. Reduce mode: Looking to break down their best options into a shortlist

3. Act mode: Ready to make a purchase

If a user is in explore mode, ChatGPT will look to support a user's exploration, suppressing ads that may undermine conversations in which users are just looking for practical or emotional support and non-commercialized suggestions. If ChatGPT detects a user is in reduce or act mode, it'll assess whether or not a particular commercial solution can help support the user's needs. 

Say a marketing manager asks ChatGPT for a recommendation on how to effectively assign and manage their team's daily tasks (exploring), ChatGPT may mainly suggest effective project management strategies, but offer to provide a list of the top-rated project management tools to help the user better manage their teams' tasks. If the same marketing manager immediately asks for a list of project management tools (looking to act), ChatGPT will return with a list of relevant solutions to help them fulfill their needs. 

"OpenAI’s preview looks pretty conservative. It’s a contextual, shopping-style sponsored placement under the answer, clearly labeled and kept separate from the organic response. That’s a familiar starting point, and it’s similar to how other answer products monetize, including Google, where ads can show up above, below or within AI Overviews. 

The bigger clue for what may come next is who’s leading it: Fidji Simo now runs Applications at OpenAI, and with her Meta and Instacart background, I’d expect ads to move past simple links into more measurable, commerce-friendly formats. Over time, the most interesting version would be ads you can act on inside the chat, like “build your cart with Brand X” or “shop this list at Brand Y.” I could also see sponsored, branched chats that let you go deeper on a topic or complete a task with a brand as a clear, opt-in next step."

- Natalia Horst, Group Director of Business Process Development, Rise

Ad format and placement

Unlike traditional ads that appear in the sidebar or on a user’s social feeds, ChatGPT’s contextual ads are contextually woven into answers triggered by user prompts, while also being clearly labeled as sponsored content: 

"One example ChatGPT offered was a grocery list based on what the user was searching for, and another one suggested places to stay for a possible upcoming trip. Honestly, this feels like a low-risk but highly relevant way to introduce ads without disrupting the user’s experience. The ads did not appear to be random but fit naturally into the conversation that could help the user move forward with their search. I expect this to open the door for a more conversational, personalized kind of advertising."

- Alma Lopez, Associate Director of Print Media

In the case of the sponsored grocery list, ChatGPT may provide a list of suggested recipes and ingredients in its answer to the user prompt. It may then share a source suggestion or next step block beneath the list, with a prompt such as, “I’ve added these ingredients to a cart from you from leading bakery-brand X, would you like to take a look?”. The goal is to help the user explore sponsored brands that help fulfill their task, helping to support rather than disrupt the task and user experience.

Let’s take a look at how advertising works on ChatGPT right now. 

No self serve ad platform yet

As mentioned above, OpenAI's advertising strategy is in its earliest stages, so you can’t sign up or sign in to advertise yetIn line with Altman’s goal to keep ChatGPT user-focused rather than brand-focused, OpenAI is prioritizing the user experience over brand access. To help protect response integrity and retain their loyal user base, OpenAI is currently running highly controlled A/B tests to make sure that brands help support, rather than take away from the user experience and catch any AI hallucinations about brand claims or product relevance. 

What brands likely need to participate

If ChatGPT ads are gatekept then how can brands try to secure an ad placement? Right now, getting featured on the platform is only possible through: 

• Partnerships: Most of the brands currently advertising with ChatGPT are part of a design partner program and are working closely with OpenAI's engineering and sales teams to develop custom integrations which allow them to feature their products in a natural way that supports user intent.

• Direct relationships: Many of the brands featured in ChatGPT’s initial rollout have prior relationships with the platform, such as Ikea. The majority of these partnerships are handshake deals that allow OpenAI to easily part ways if the ads with a particular brand fail to test well on the platform.

• Agency partnerships: Omnicom, WPP and Dentsu report they've secured spots for over 30 of their top clients.

• Pilot programs: Pilots refer to time-bound experiments. Brands like Expedia or Kayaks are involved in early pilots, trialing their ads for a limited time with ChatGPT. As these brands deal in structured, readable (for LLMs) data, such as flight or hotel data, their solutions are easier to read and recommend for AI than more complicated solutions — making them a natural fit for pilots.

Brands will also need a sizable budget to partner with OpenAI. Minimum spends reportedly start at $200,000.

These approaches favor large or experimental brands, those with bigger budgets or lower risk aversion, who have the time, the budget, or the inclination to experiment with less proven advertising channels and strategies. 

With social and pay-per-click (PPC) ads, demographics or search-related behavior factors like user intent or search behavior are the main focus of effective ad targeting, while conversational-context-based ads use intent matching to deliver in-conversation ads that help users fulfill a specific task. 

Intent-based ads in ChatGPT differ from the ads featured on Google or social because ad content serves a functional purpose and is directly incorporated into the user’s interaction with the platform, rather than running adjacent to it — out to “distract” a user from their task. 

93% of consumers say they skip or block ads, showing just how annoying and disruptive ads can be. 

Arguably, intent-based ads help support users’ goals and add to their experience, rather than disrupting it. 

Unlike ads on other channels, which rely on hard-to-pin-down or irrelevant demographics and indirect user behaviors to target consumers, ChatGPT identifies users’ goals and seeks to support them with commercial content only when it's relevant to the users’ needs and intent. Unlike search or social ads, it doesn’t need to rely on “distracting” users from the task at hand. As a result, ad content immediately becomes more relevant, personalized and seemingly less disruptive. 

From targeting to intent matching

Conversational ads differ from keyword search or social feeds, because rather than target users based on demographics or behavioral factors like searcher intent or search behavior patterns, users are targeted based on conversational intent. Ad content helps serve a functional purpose, rather than running adjacent to users main content focus. 

That said, conversational-context-based ads could help support user intent and add to the user experience rather than disrupting it. 

With so much consumer frustration around “intrusive” ads, ChatGPT’s move to target consumers based on conversation context may pave the way for more thoughtful, user-friendly ad strategies that help support user end-goals rather than disrupt them. The current data backs up the effectiveness of this approach with contextual ads seeing up to 30% higher conversion rates than traditional ads. 

Higher relevance, higher risk

While targeting based on search intent or patterns and demographics allows brands to target a large number of consumers at once — conversational ads need to be highly relevant to the user to be effective. 

Nearly 20% of consumers are quick to ditch conversational AI if it fails to deliver, with 18% of consumers saying they’d only use a chatbot a second time if it successfully supported their task the first time. Consumer trust, especially when it comes to AI, is highly fragile. Mismatched or intrusive ads could mean bad things for brands and bad things for ChatGPT. 

While a relevant conversational ad can add to, rather than take away from, the user experience and help support user goals, an irrelevant ad in an AI-based environment may feel even more intrusive and off-putting than an ad on other channels. While an irrelevant ad on TikTok or Google is easy to scroll past or mute, a poor-fit recommendation from ChatGPT would likely completely disrupt the user experience — damaging trust for both the brand and ChatGPT. 

Testing and validation are essentials to effective advertising. But this becomes even more necessary in a high-stakes AI environment. 

Early experimentation needs to be a core part of your strategy before you scale spend. Your messaging, image choices and tone need to be highly relevant and resonate with your audience. That’s where consumer insights come in. 

Using consumer insights to reduce risk

Audience or consumer insights are a core part of reducing your risk on emerging channels like ChatGPT. Zappi allows you to build campaigns and strategies highly attuned to your target consumers, helping to reduce the risk of launching messaging that doesn’t resonate.

Use Zappi to test messaging, positioning and creative concepts with real audiences well before you launch in an emerging channel like ChatGPT. Zappi allows you to target each component of your ad strategy, allowing you to test, analyze and improve your concept based on audiences who share the characteristics of the consumers you’ll target. 

Our Automated AI Quick Reports also helps to analyze and synthesize your quantitative and qualitative test data, giving you easily-digestible breakdowns into how your messaging, tone and images resonate with real consumers. This allows you to act quickly, informing an agile, responsive advertising strategy. 

As the platform’s in the earliest stages of ad testing, it’s a smart move to see how other brands perform on ChatGPT before rushing in. 

To be ready for your unveil on the platform, start experimenting with testing and insight-led experimentation. Zappi can help you differentiate smart smart strategic moves from costly missteps — allowing you to find the ideal messages, tone and creativity for your audience.