Bit by bit, advertisements are creeping onto ChatGPT.
OpenAI’s ads push has been met with intense scrutiny. It’s a potentially huge revenue driver, and it also raises questions about privacy, personalization, and bias in its chatbot.
Business Insider viewed data on tens of thousands of recent ChatGPT prompts collected by two adtech companies to examine how Sam Altman’s company is beginning to serve up ads. While only a tiny fraction of the chatbots’ responses include ads, trends have already emerged: tons of software and travel ads, and few for health. And a whole lot depends on how you phrase your questions.
At ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022, OpenAI kept responses ad-free as the tool gained steam. Then this year, that started to change. OpenAI launched tests in February with a select group of advertisers, and in May, it cracked the door wider by launching a new ad-buying tool and said more businesses could apply to begin bidding for ad placements.
Google, Meta, and Amazon have shaped their ad products over years of fine-tuning, turning their systems into some of the tech world’s largest money-makers. An OpenAI spokesperson told Business Insider that while it’s still early days for the ads effort, the team has been encouraged by signs that ads can be useful yet non-intrusive. Advertisers don’t get access to conversations or personal data, the spokesperson said. They didn’t respond to questions about the adtech firms’ data.
With ChatGPT’s weekly user base nearing 1 billion, advertisers see a huge opportunity. Jasman Singh, lead analyst at AI marketing startup Profound, told Business Insider his startup’s customers see ChatGPT as “one of the biggest surface areas for advertising in the history of technology.”
ChatGPT isn’t like TikTok, X, or Google.
When Singh scanned 66,000 ChatGPT ad placements from Profound’s dataset of opted-in users, he found a glut of software ads.
ChatGPT isn’t dominated by a bunch of TikTok-style ads for sunset lamps or selfie sticks. Software companies make up the largest share, accounting for 34% of the ads Singh analyzed, and ads for creator, design, and media tools account for another 15%.
Singh said this aligns with people’s usage of ChatGPT. While people use it for information or shopping, about 40% of the prompts he saw were work-related. ChatGPT serves ads to people as they seek the chatbot’s help with building things.
“The advertisers and the types of software that they sell to customers are really around tooling that helps customers do the work,” Singh said.
Courtesy of Profound
OpenAI appears to consider users’ intent as they search, Singh said. In the data, he found that questions with a commercial intent, such as “buy a swimsuit,” were slightly more likely to trigger an ad than questions seeking information or generating work. Only slightly, though — nothing like Google, which stuffs ads into the results on every commercial query.
Singh also said that only 1% to 2% of ChatGPT prompts yielded ads, and across ChatGPT conversations with an ad, 83% had only one. That could easily change. For now, OpenAI has avoided plugging up its product with too many sales pitches.
Not seeing ads on ChatGPT? Here’s why.
In mid-May, the British adtech company Adthena sent 90,000 prompts to ChatGPT to measure the chatbot’s behavior.
Adthena found that prompts with the “buy” structure yielded ads 15% of the time, more than “best X” (12%), “near me / service / installer” (10.3%), and “X vs Y” (8.5%). For example, if you ask “buy a used electric vehicle,” you’re more likely to get an ad than on a search for “used Tesla vs used Lucid.”
That approach makes sense, said Ashley Fletcher, Adthena’s chief marketing officer, because users would likely prefer that in a private conversation with a large language model.
ChatGPT looks more similar to Google when it comes to travel. Fletcher found that travel-related questions had more ads across more marketers than clothing or consumer electronics questions. He counted 31 different advertisers, including Expedia, Airbnb, Hilton, and Royal Caribbean.
On the flip side was health: “No telehealth, no Rx, no GLP-1, no large insurers,” Fletcher wrote. This was ChatGPT’s biggest difference from how Google serves ads.
For both users and advertisers, ChatGPT’s ad tools are in flux. While speaking with Business Insider, Fletcher refreshed the OpenAI ads manager page and got some good news: Adthena’s application to advertise had just been approved.
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