Don't Confuse ChatGPT's Influence With the Value of ChatGPT Ads

ChatGPT may become one of the most influential places on the internet for purchase decisions. That does not automatically make ChatGPT Ads one of the most valuable places to advertise.

The most valuable commercial placement inside ChatGPT may be the one advertisers cannot buy.

Imagine asking ChatGPT which accounting platform is right for your company.

You explain that you have 25 employees. You are based in the UK. You already use HubSpot. You need multi-currency invoicing, decent reporting and integrations with your existing stack. You tell ChatGPT what you dislike about your current software and what you are prepared to spend.

ChatGPT asks a few questions, compares the options and eventually recommends two products.

Then, underneath that answer, you see an ad for a third.

There are two commercially valuable things happening on that screen.

But they are not the same thing.

One company earned a place inside the recommendation.

Another paid for visibility next to it.

As excitement builds around ChatGPT Ads, marketers risk confusing those two assets.

OpenAI says its advertising business reached a $1 billion annualised revenue run rate in less than 200 days, with tens of thousands of advertisers using the platform. (13)

The opportunity is clearly real.

But there is a conceptual jump hidden inside much of the excitement:

ChatGPT is becoming extraordinarily influential in purchasing decisions; therefore, advertising inside ChatGPT must be extraordinarily valuable.

That conclusion has not been proven.

Being recommended by ChatGPT and advertising on ChatGPT are fundamentally different things.

ChatGPT Ads need to prove their economics independently.

Are ChatGPT Ads worth it?

They are worth testing.

They are not yet worth treating as if their economics are as established as paid search.

There is already credible evidence that ChatGPT Ads can generate leads, signups, purchases and return on ad spend. OpenAI is also improving the product extremely quickly, adding conversion optimisation, Sponsored Agents, CRM integrations, ecommerce integrations and AI-assisted campaign management.

But performance remains highly variable. The addressable advertising audience is not identical to ChatGPT’s total audience. Ads sit separately from ChatGPT’s independent recommendations. And advertisers still lack mature cross-industry benchmarks for knowing what good performance should look like.

The question is therefore not:

Can ChatGPT Ads work?

Clearly they can.

The more useful question is:

What makes the paid placement valuable after ChatGPT has already done part of the work of understanding, comparing and recommending?

That is where things get more interesting.

AI is influencing purchases. That does not automatically make the ad inventory valuable.

The bullish case for advertising inside AI starts with some remarkable consumer behaviour.

Menlo Ventures’ 2026 State of Consumer AI research surveyed 5,067 U.S. adults. (1)

Among shoppers who use AI, 50% had used it to compare prices, 43% to narrow a shortlist, 37% had made a final purchase decision based on an AI recommendation, and 26% had allowed AI to complete a purchase.

Those numbers deserve advertisers’ attention.

People are no longer using AI only to answer informational questions.

They are allowing it to shape consideration sets, eliminate alternatives, compare prices and sometimes determine what gets bought.

But this is where two different propositions are often collapsed into one.

AI is influencing purchasing decisions.

There is increasingly strong evidence for that.

Ads inside AI must therefore be exceptionally valuable.

That still needs to be demonstrated.

One of the largest studies of ChatGPT commerce traffic makes the distinction clearer.

A peer-reviewed 2026 Marketing Science study analysed 12 months of first-party ecommerce data from 973 websites representing $20 billion in combined revenue. The dataset included more than 50,000 transactions originating from organic ChatGPT referrals and 164 million transactions from traditional channels. (2)

Organic LLM traffic produced conversion rates and revenue per session above paid social, but below every other traditional channel measured.

But it demonstrates an important principle.

A channel can be highly influential during a purchasing decision without automatically becoming the highest-converting source of traffic at the end of that decision.

Influence and advertising value are related. They are not interchangeable.

ChatGPT Ads should not inherit their expected value simply from how important ChatGPT itself has become.

ChatGPT Ads may exclude some of AI’s most intensive users

There is another structural issue that deserves more attention.

The people who rely most heavily on AI are considerably more likely to pay for AI.

Menlo found that payers use AI daily at almost twice the rate of non-payers, 50% versus 26%. (1)

The difference in agent usage is even larger: 65% of payers use AI agents compared with 13% of non-payers.

Other 2025 and 2026 research points in the same direction.

A peer-reviewed study of paid and free GenAI users found that paid users had more AI experience and used substantially more AI tools. (3)

A separate South Korean study found higher practical AI literacy and greater concentration in knowledge-intensive groups among paid users. (4)

Epoch AI and Ipsos also found a clear gradient in professional usage between free, self-paid and employer-funded AI access. (5)

The biggest difference between paid and free AI users appears not to be a simple demographic variable such as age or income.

It is depth of reliance.

That matters because ChatGPT does not show ads to everyone.

OpenAI says ads may appear to users on the Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts do not receive ads. Eligible Free users can also choose an ad-free experience with reduced usage limits. (7)

This creates an unusual monetisation dynamic.

As ChatGPT becomes useful enough that someone is prepared to pay more for access, some users move out of the advertising audience altogether.

That does not mean the remaining audience is low value.

ChatGPT Go is itself a paid product and still carries ads. Plenty of commercially attractive users will remain on Free. Employer-funded AI use also complicates the picture.

But the structural issue remains.

ChatGPT can monetise a highly engaged consumer in two different ways: subscription revenue or advertising revenue.

The better the product becomes, the more attractive the first option may become for some of its deepest users.

That produces what could become the ChatGPT advertising paradox:

The more valuable AI becomes to some of its most intensive users, the more likely those users are to pay for an experience without advertising.

Traditional search does not have quite the same dynamic.

A wealthy executive can use Google dozens of times per day, make expensive purchases online and represent an ideal advertiser audience without becoming such an intensive search user that Google removes them from the advertising pool.

ChatGPT has that option.

So headline ChatGPT audience figures should not automatically be interpreted as equivalent advertising reach.

ChatGPT Ads appear after the answer, changing what the ad has to do

There is an even more fundamental difference.

OpenAI’s current advertiser documentation says ChatGPT Ads appear below responses and are selected using signals including the context and intent of the current conversation. (8)

OpenAI also says ads run separately from the chat model and do not influence ChatGPT’s answers. (7)

Think about how much may already have happened before the advertiser appears.

ChatGPT may have:

• identified what the user actually needs;
• explained the category;
• created evaluation criteria;
• compared alternatives;
• answered objections;
• narrowed a shortlist;
• recommended specific brands.

The advertisement therefore often enters a conversation in which a substantial part of the information problem has already been solved.

Traditional search advertising can intercept a user while they are still trying to resolve that problem.

Standard ChatGPT Ads often have to add value after substantial information has already been supplied.

Sometimes that is a disadvantage.

If ChatGPT has already completely answered the question, there may be little reason to click anything afterwards.

This concern appears in early practitioner experience as well.

After spending close to $70,000 testing ChatGPT Ads, Hostinger’s Hüseyin Ograk argued in a public breakdown of the experiment that one challenge was precisely that the user may already have received a useful answer before reaching the sponsored placement. (22)

A practitioner discussing live campaigns in the r/PPC community reached a related conclusion: the advertisement often needs to offer the next useful step, not attempt to repeat the answer ChatGPT just gave. (23)

But there is another side to this.

The conversation may make the customer more qualified before the advertiser ever sees them.

LegalNature offers a useful example.

In an OpenAI-published case study, nearly 40% of visitors arriving through ChatGPT Ads reportedly began its document-creation flow, while around 8% completed an entire guided legal document. (14)

The explanation is plausible: by the time those users reached LegalNature, some had already worked through what they needed with ChatGPT.

The answer did not remove commercial intent.

It refined it.

This is why simply describing ChatGPT conversations as “high intent” is not enough.

A more useful concept is the completion gap.

The completion gap may matter more than purchase intent

The completion gap is the amount of work still unresolved after ChatGPT has answered the user’s question.

The larger that gap, the more opportunity there may be for another company to provide the next useful action.

Consider two conversations.

Someone asks:

“Which HDMI cable do I need for this television?”

ChatGPT may be able to solve almost the entire information problem.

The user identifies the right specification, buys the cable and moves on.

The completion gap is small.

Now consider:

“I am setting up a company with a co-founder. What should our operating agreement include?”

ChatGPT can explain the agreement, highlight common clauses, surface potential problems and help the founders understand what they need.

But the user may still require:

• a finished legal document;
• a filing workflow;
• specialist software;
• professional advice;
• signatures;
• a transaction.

The completion gap is much larger.

Or consider a developer asking:

“How should I add reliable video calling to my application?”

ChatGPT can explain the architecture, suggest technologies and even help write code.

But the developer may still need infrastructure, APIs, uptime, compliance, support and production-scale delivery.

Again, there is unresolved commercial work.

The question	What ChatGPT can resolve	What still needs doing	Completion gap
Which HDMI cable do I need for this television?	Almost the entire information problem: the right specification	Buying the cable	Small
What should our operating agreement include?	The agreement, common clauses, potential problems	A finished document, filing, software, advice, signatures, a transaction	Large
How should I add reliable video calling to my application?	The architecture, suitable technologies, some of the code	Infrastructure, APIs, uptime, compliance, support, production-scale delivery	Large

This helps explain why companies such as LegalNature and Stream can perform well even though the ChatGPT answer appears before the advertisement. (14)(15)

ChatGPT can clarify the job.

It cannot necessarily finish the job.

That leads to a useful hypothesis:

ChatGPT Ads may be strongest where AI can diagnose or clarify the need, but another company still has to execute the solution.

Intent alone may therefore be the wrong thing to optimise around.

Advertisers should also ask:

How much work remains after ChatGPT has answered?

Sponsored Agents could help advertisers close the completion gap

On September 16, 2026, OpenAI introduced one of the most important changes to ChatGPT Ads so far: Sponsored Agents. (9)

After clicking a relevant ad, a user can choose to start a clearly labelled conversation with an AI representative sponsored by that business.

The user can ask follow-up questions and continue exploring the advertiser’s product or service.

OpenAI says Sponsored Agents are currently available only to selected advertisers in a limited alpha test. (10)

This matters because it directly addresses one of the limitations of the first advertising format.

Previously, the journey could look like:

ChatGPT answer → sponsored card → website

Sponsored Agents can turn that into:

ChatGPT answer → sponsored placement → sponsored conversation → next action

That could be materially more powerful.

Instead of asking a user to leave ChatGPT immediately, the advertiser gets another opportunity to answer product-specific questions and reduce remaining uncertainty inside the conversational interface.

In other words: Sponsored Agents may give advertisers a new way to close the completion gap.

If the user already knows what problem they have but still needs help choosing a provider, understanding the offer or resolving objections, a sponsored conversation could be considerably more useful than a static ad.

That strengthens the long-term bull case for ChatGPT Ads.

But it does not yet prove the economics.

Sponsored Agents remain in limited testing.

We do not yet have broad independent data showing whether conversational selling produces higher incremental conversion, stronger ROAS or greater customer lifetime value.

This is a recurring theme with ChatGPT Ads:

The product is evolving faster than the market can establish stable benchmarks for it.

The organic answer still owns something advertisers cannot buy

Sponsored Agents make the paid experience more powerful.

They do not erase the distinction between paid and organic visibility.

OpenAI says advertisements do not influence ChatGPT’s answers. Advertisers cannot pay to shape, rank or alter the independent response. (7)

That separation is essential to the product.

It also defines the limit of what the advertiser can purchase.

Suppose I ask:

“What is the best CRM for a 30-person SaaS company?”

ChatGPT understands my requirements and recommends Product A.

Product B can potentially buy a sponsored placement beneath that recommendation.

Product B may now even be able to continue the conversation through a Sponsored Agent.

But Product B still cannot purchase the sentence:

“Based on what you’ve told me, Product B is the best fit.”

That distinction is enormous.

An advertiser can buy visibility beside ChatGPT’s recommendation. It cannot buy the independent recommendation itself.

The thing that makes ChatGPT commercially influential is precisely the thing OpenAI has to keep independent from advertisers.

If the organic answer simply went to whoever paid the most, its recommendation value would deteriorate.

Research into sponsored AI recommendations suggests that distinction can matter for trust.

A Nürnberg Institute for Market Decisions experiment involving 555 participants found that sponsorship disclosure did not directly reduce recommendation adherence across all conditions. However, sponsored recommendations reduced perceived integrity, and lower perceived integrity was associated with weaker adherence. Higher interactivity reduced some of that negative effect. (6)

That result is particularly interesting in light of Sponsored Agents.

A more interactive sponsored experience may partly offset the trust disadvantage associated with sponsorship.

But it does not transform the sponsored recommendation into an independent one.

Paid and organic still begin from different positions.

Seer Interactive analysed 3,697 ChatGPT ads and found that the advertiser appeared in ChatGPT’s organic response only 5.4% of the time. The advertiser was cited as a source only 3.3% of the time. (20)

That means ChatGPT can effectively produce this experience:

Organic answer: Here are the brands I think fit your needs.

Sponsored placement: Here is another brand that paid for an opportunity to be considered.

Those are two different competitive surfaces.

	Organic ChatGPT answer	ChatGPT Ad
Placement	Inside the independent answer	Separate sponsored experience
Can the advertiser buy it?	No	Yes
Can it carry ChatGPT's independent recommendation?	Yes	No
Primary optimisation problem	Organic AI visibility / GEO	Paid media
Main challenge	Being retrieved, understood and selected	Turning sponsored attention into incremental commercial value

For a brand that does not appear in the answer, paid advertising may offer a valuable second opportunity.

For a brand that already wins the answer, competitors can potentially advertise beneath one of its strongest moments.

That is why paid AI visibility and organic AI visibility should not be treated as substitutes.

They solve different problems, and both sit within a broader question of AI Commerce Readiness: whether a brand is prepared to be discovered, understood, recommended and ultimately chosen as more purchasing journeys move through AI.

Why ChatGPT Ads could still become an exceptional advertising channel

The argument so far should not be mistaken for a bearish view of ChatGPT Ads.

The bull case is serious.

A Google keyword might tell an advertiser:

“CRM software”

A ChatGPT conversation may reveal:

“I run a 30-person SaaS business in the UK. We currently use HubSpot. Salesforce is too expensive. We need API access, customer success workflows and implementation within two weeks. Our budget is £700 per month.”

From an advertising perspective, that context is extraordinary.

OpenAI says its ad-selection system can consider conversation context and intent alongside the advertiser’s landing page, copy, context hints, targeting choices and, where enabled, broader personalisation signals. (8)

That gives ChatGPT something potentially more expressive than a keyword.

And some early advertisers are reporting excellent results.

• LegalNature has reported unusually deep downstream engagement. (14)
• Stream has reported approximately 2x ROAS. (15)
• Jotform has reported signup economics comparing favourably with established paid channels. (16)
• Angi has reported meaningful improvements as conversion optimisation matured. (17)

But they prove an important point:

ChatGPT Ads can work.

The question is not whether a profitable campaign exists.

It is how predictable and generalisable those economics become.

ChatGPT may eventually understand commercial intent better than a search engine ever understood a keyword.

But understanding commercial intent and reliably monetising commercial intent are different capabilities.

Google has spent decades building the second.

OpenAI is moving remarkably quickly.

HubSpot and Shopify show how quickly the infrastructure gap is closing

The September 16 announcement also changed another part of the ChatGPT Ads debate.

It is becoming harder to argue that ChatGPT Ads lack serious performance-marketing infrastructure.

OpenAI announced HubSpot as its first CRM partner and Shopify as its first e-commerce partner. (9)

The HubSpot integration allows advertisers to connect their ChatGPT Ads account, build campaigns, capture leads directly into the CRM, trigger follow-up workflows and compare impressions, clicks, contacts, customers and cost alongside other advertising channels. (11)

The Shopify integration connects a merchant’s product catalogue and commerce-event data with ChatGPT Ads Manager, helping align inventory and reduce manual campaign and measurement setup. (12)

OpenAI is also adding natural-language campaign management, AI-assisted creative generation and optional text customisation based on conversational context.

These are important developments.

They weaken the argument that ChatGPT Ads are simply an experimental ad card with immature tooling.

The better argument now is:

The infrastructure gap is closing quickly. The benchmark gap is not.

An advertiser may increasingly be able to answer:

• Did the ad generate a lead?
• Did that lead enter the CRM?
• Did the customer buy?
• What revenue was attributed?
• How does the campaign compare with another channel inside our reporting environment?

Those are essential questions.

But they are not the only questions.

A marketer still needs to know:

• Would that customer have converted anyway?
• How much of the result is incremental?
• Should the next £100,000 go into ChatGPT Ads, Google, Meta or another channel?
• What should a good CPC, CPL or ROAS look like for this category?

Those questions require benchmarks and comparative economics, not simply better measurement infrastructure.

And that is where the market remains immature.

$1 billion proves demand. It does not settle what the inventory is worth.

Reaching a $1 billion annualised advertising run rate in less than 200 days is an extraordinary achievement. (13)

It demonstrates serious advertiser demand.

AdExchanger reported that OpenAI said promotional credits were excluded from the figure, meaning the run rate represented actual advertiser spend rather than media being given away to stimulate adoption. (18)

Advertisers are clearly willing to test the platform.

Some are willing to spend substantial amounts.

But advertiser demand for a new channel and mature evidence of advertiser returns are not the same thing.

Search Engine Journal’s September review found reported CPCs ranging from below $3 to more than $20 depending on the advertiser and market. (19)

OpenAI had not published broad performance benchmarks across advertisers, industries or campaign types.

That makes performance difficult to contextualise.

A £7 CPC can be outstanding for one advertiser and disastrous for another.

A 0.7% CTR can be irrelevant if the traffic creates profitable customers, or unacceptable if it produces little downstream value.

ROAS can look impressive while still failing an incrementality test.

The early results are not uniformly bad.

They are inconsistent.

That inconsistency is itself the point.

ChatGPT Ads have already won the budget test. They have not yet won the benchmark test.

The September 16 product announcements do not invalidate this argument.

They reinforce how young the market is.

Days after advertisers were still discussing the lack of established performance norms, OpenAI announced Sponsored Agents, HubSpot and Shopify integrations, AI-assisted campaign management and new creative capabilities.

The product advertisers are evaluating is changing almost week by week.

That leads to what I think is the right stance:

ChatGPT Ads are evolving too quickly to dismiss, but also too quickly to pretend their mature economics are already known.

Marketers may still be focusing on the wrong ChatGPT opportunity

The biggest strategic mistake would be to spend the next two years obsessing only over how to buy ChatGPT visibility while ignoring how to earn ChatGPT recommendations.

Paid visibility matters.

Sponsored Agents make it more interesting.

HubSpot makes it easier to measure.

Shopify makes the commerce connection tighter.

The advertising platform will almost certainly become substantially better than it is today.

But if AI assistants become a major layer of product discovery, there is another commercial position that remains fundamentally different:

the answer itself.

That position cannot currently be bought.

It has to be earned through the information the model can retrieve, the sources it trusts, the way a brand and its products are represented across the web, third-party authority, reviews, original information and all of the other signals that affect whether an AI system understands and recommends something.

A company can ask:

How do we appear underneath the answer?

That is an advertising problem.

It should also ask:

How do we become part of the answer?

That is an organic AI visibility problem.

The second position may ultimately prove to be the more valuable one.

We do not yet have enough evidence to state that an organic ChatGPT recommendation generates more incremental revenue than a paid ChatGPT placement.

But the structural difference is clear.

One may carry ChatGPT’s independent recommendation authority.

The other carries a sponsored label.

Brands should understand both.

They just should not value them as if they were the same asset.

Keep expectations high for AI commerce, but lower for AI advertising

I am bullish on AI’s influence over commerce.

The evidence increasingly supports it.

Consumers are already using AI to research, compare, shortlist, decide and, in some cases, complete purchases.

That could make ChatGPT one of the most commercially important interfaces on the internet.

I am also increasingly bullish on what ChatGPT Ads could become.

Sponsored Agents directly address some of the limitations of passive advertising beneath an AI answer.

HubSpot and Shopify reduce operational and measurement friction.

Conversational context could give advertisers an unusually rich understanding of customer intent.

And the product is evolving at exceptional speed.

But that is different from saying the channel’s mature economics have already been established.

They have not.

Some intensive AI users sit outside the ad-supported audience.

The paid experience remains separate from ChatGPT’s independent recommendation.

Results still vary substantially between advertisers.

Cross-industry benchmarks remain limited.

And the platform itself is changing too quickly for today’s performance data to be treated as a permanent rule.

None of this is a reason to avoid ChatGPT Ads.

Test them.

Learn the platform while the market is young.

Find the conversations where your product genuinely provides the next useful step.

Measure actual customers, revenue and incrementality rather than stopping at CTR.

And pay particular attention to the completion gap between what ChatGPT can explain and what the customer still needs somebody else to do.

Some companies will build highly profitable acquisition channels there.

Just do not justify the investment by pointing to how influential ChatGPT has become.

Don’t confuse being recommended by ChatGPT with advertising on ChatGPT.

They are not the same asset.

For many brands, the most valuable placement inside ChatGPT may still turn out to be the one that isn’t for sale.

Why we prioritise organic LLM visibility at Herm

That distinction is also why organic LLM visibility is a core part of how we approach AI Commerce Readiness at Herm.

We prioritise helping our partners show up organically in LLM results, including ChatGPT.

Paid AI advertising creates another opportunity to enter the conversation, and we expect that opportunity to become increasingly important. But our priority is to help brands win the actual recommendation inside the independent answer itself: the part of the experience users can interpret as the AI’s genuine recommendation, rather than a placement purchased by an advertiser.

That is the visibility we believe matters most over the long term.

When someone asks an AI which product, service or brand they should consider, we want our partners to earn a place in the answer being used to make that decision, not only in the sponsored inventory that appears around it.

Frequently asked questions