OpenAI badly wants a piece of the advertising empires that Google and Meta built, and it has a lot of catch-up to do.
The AI startup began selling ads on its blockbuster ChatGPT product in February, and the ensuing months have brought geographic expansions, added capabilities, and new advertisers onto the platform. Still, ChatGPT’s ads business has a long way to go before it rakes in anything like the revenue OpenAI has projected, and customers using ChatGPT for advertising told Business Insider that the product is still rudimentary.
Advertising is becoming a major opportunity for OpenAI. ChatGPT now has around 1 billion monthly users. If OpenAI can grow into a Google- or Meta-sized ad seller, it could rake in billions of dollars and can rely less on business deals than its rival Anthropic does. That will require a long, hard push — and overcoming stark doubts.
OpenAI said in March that its ad business had hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue. In April, the Information and Axios reported that OpenAI was forecasting about $2.4 billion in ads revenue in 2026 and around $100 billion in 2030.
“I don’t think there’s any chance they hit that goal,” said Nate Elliott, an analyst at the data firm EMARKETER.
To hit those numbers, OpenAI would need to dramatically grow its user count, handily beat Google in the consumer AI market, price its ads aggressively, and fill ChatGPT with an “unbearably” high load of ads, Elliott told Business Insider, describing his firm’s analysis.
“We look at their numbers and the assumptions required to get there, and we don’t see any of those assumptions as logical or reasonable,” Elliott said of OpenAI’s projections.
EMARKETER predicts that the entire chatbot ads market will make less than $1 billion this year. In comparison, Google generated over $294 billion in ads revenue in 2025.
While advertisers are excited about OpenAI’s offering, they said they are still adjusting to the relative lack of tools for campaign creation, measurement, and reporting. Google and Meta’s advertising tools offer more features for metrics, testing, and videos.
An OpenAI spokesperson told Business Insider the company is still learning from advertisers and expanding the platform’s capabilities, though they did not respond to the EMARKETER analysis. They added that ChatGPT’s ads are still in their early days and are only appearing in seven countries so far.
OpenAI is careful not to pump too many ads into ChatGPT
Initially, OpenAI kept ChatGPT ad-free. CEO Sam Altman called the combination of AI and ads a “last resort” in 2024. The company’s financial concerns won out, and under its former applications CEO, Fidji Simo, it began holding discussions about what forms ads could take.
A pilot round of advertising began in February, with major companies committing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Business Insider asked OpenAI’s ads chief, Dave Dugan, at Cannes about early advertisers not being able to buy as many ads as they wanted, and he said that the company “started very conservatively at the beginning to focus on the user experience.”
In May, OpenAI launched a tool that let other companies create and manage their own ads. The tool is simple, without many of the bells and whistles that Google and Meta have added over the years to their advertising products. It wasn’t until July that marketers could target ChatGPT ads to a geographic area within the US, rather than the entire country.
When marketing startup Launch10 tested ChatGPT’s advertising tool, its campaign got a far lower click-through rate than on Google ads, said CEO Greg Hockenbrocht. He added that he thought the tool would have more features for generating ad copy and testing variants.
“My own expectation was that given it was an ads platform launched by one of the leading foundation model companies, that the platform would be a little bit more, call it, ‘AI-native,'” Hockenbrocht told Business Insider.
Still, Hockenbrocht sees the new addition of location targeting as proof of improvement. And during a recent monthlong ad campaign, Hockenbrocht said that impressions and clicks increased noticeably over time.
“I give credit to the OpenAI team,” he said. “They’re shipping quickly, which is good. I think they’re going to have to continue to do that.”
Advertisers have to adjust their expectations
Unlike Google’s keyword bidding or Meta’s audience targeting, ChatGPT ads pop up based on a multi-step conversation.
The new format is great for some advertisers. AI text-to-speech startup Speechify has been advertising with OpenAI since the early pilots. Its chief business officer, Rohan Pavuluri, told Business Insider that because developers ask ChatGPT for advice and Speechify ads appear under text-to-speech tool comparisons, the startup has seen a stream of new business.
Kevin Roy, the CEO of advertising agency GreenBanana SEO, told Business Insider that while his firm’s clients have been excited about the prospect of reaching ChatGPT’s broad audience, they need to rethink their ads to focus on the questions a user might provide in their ChatGPT prompt. They also need to be OK with seeing less data about their ads, for now.
“There’s very few levers that we can pull in Chat ads, compared to the dozens and dozens of levers in Google Ads,” Roy said.
Dugan pitched OpenAI’s speed and AI usage as a way to catch up in advertising when he talked to Business Insider in June.
“Our engineers use our own products like Codex to build out the product set, and that’s meant that the pace of our launches, often on a weekly basis, is much faster than anything I’ve experienced before,” Dugan said.
Since launching its ad product, OpenAI has added digital ad standbys such as cost-per-click bidding and conversion-tracking tools.
Pavuluri, from Speechify, had another request for the team. He said he’s delighted with the advertising offering on ChatGPT so far. He’d also like to see his company’s ads placed in Codex.
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