OpenAI officially launched the ChatGPT Ads pilot on February 9, 2026, rolling the placements out more widely as of May. While we've been tracking how ads work, tests and usability through our own pilot and other studies, we have not had a view into how often they show up, what types of prompts they’re shown for, and how well they align with those responses that they are served under.
That changed this week when ads started appearing in our AI tracker.
Advertising in ChatGPT is creating more questions than answers right now:
- Are ads showing up on the prompts I care about? Are they my competitors?
- If ChatGPT is answering the questions outright, will my ad be effective?
- Should I bid on my own branded prompts, the way I'd defend terms in paid search?
- If I'm the brand ChatGPT already recommends, can a competitor's ad still take the moment from me?
But that doesn't mean that placing some smart bets and experiments isn't right for your brand. And now that we're starting to get some real data around ChatGPT ads, experimenting effectively is going to get a whole lot more interesting walking into the second half of 2026.
AI Search is just SEO? Not anymore.
For the past year we have treated AI search as its own lane, sitting somewhere alongside SEO and how people organically find answers and products. Paid now sits directly underneath the organic answer. Is that different than Google Search with ads? Yes, in how ads and organic are positioned. But the two experiences are starting to converge, both now living inside a single customer's research and context within ChatGPT.
This is the first three days of data, so take it as a first look and a set of questions worth asking & testing, not conclusive evidence.
Here are 5 initial observations that are helping inform early experimentation:
1. Ads are showing in 7.7% of responses, and climbing rapidly
Until this week, ads had never appeared in our tracked ChatGPT responses. Then they jumped to 5% of responses on July 7, climbing to 6.93% on July 8, and by July 9 they were in 7.71%.
Now ChatGPT Ads are:
- Visible in 93% of our brand AI tracking workspaces (84 of 90)
- From 470 unique advertisers across that initial 3 days of data alone
We expect these ad placements to keep climbing.
Why? Google Search ads often concentrate on high-intent searches near the point of purchase.
Evaluation ChatGPT queries are the largest single stage at 41.9%, but awareness (22.3%) and advice (19.1%) together make up more than 40% of impressions, while comparison queries own 16.7% of impressions.
Advertisers are already running these as both lead gen and brand awareness plays across the funnel within the prospective customers own ChatGPT context.
Ads are showing across nearly every industry we track, but early spend is heavily front-loaded in software and services.
- B2B Software and SaaS leads at 308 impressions making up 26.3% of total impressions, double the next category
- Cybersecurity, privacy and GRC had 154 impressions, 13.2% of total
- Comparison and review sites had 145 impressions, 12.4% of total
These are the fast movers you would expect to test a new channel first, so we are reading this as who is quickest to adopt, not where ads will ultimately concentrate.
Several other industries are ticking up their impression share in ChatGPT ads and testing early:
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- Legal services & legal tech gained 84 ad impressions, 7.2% of total
- Insurance & financial services gained 80 impressions, 6.8% of total
- Education & career gained 64 impressions, 5.5% of total
- Marketing & agencies gained 57 impressions, 4.9% of total
- Consumer & retail gained 56 impressions, 4.8% of total
- Travel & hospitality gained 55 impression, 4.7% of total
- Home services & building products gained 52 impressions, 4.4% of total
- AI & cloud infrastructure gained 51 impressions, 4.4% of total
- Healthcare gained 49 impressions, 4.2% of total
- Energy & utilities gained 14 impressions, 1.2% total
2. Branded prompts are unclaimed
Only 2.2% of the brand's prompt responses featured its own ad.
That is not brands losing a bidding war. Most of them are not running ChatGPT ads yet at all, so their branded prompts are simply sitting open. Nobody is defending "should I get [your brand] or [their brand]" because they’re just not in the channel yet.
That puts a familiar paid search question in a new place: should you advertise on your own branded prompts? Right now the slot is uncontested and a rival can take it without outbidding anyone. We specifically saw one example of a competitor using an ad to guide the user in another direction with "Looking Beyond [Brand]? Try [Competitor]" on the branded prompt.
3 months ago, winning the recommendation in ChatGPT's response was the win and a sign your GEO strategy was paying off. Now there's a new obstacle between your brand and being chosen.
Monitoring what AI says about you in its responses is no longer enough, you also need to watch what your competitors can say about you.
Three days in, ad volume is already climbing fast. If you are not claiming your branded prompts, someone else will be doing it soon.
3. The advertiser was in the organic response only 5% of the time
When an ad shows, the advertiser is almost never part of the answer it sits beside: across 703 ads, the advertiser appeared in ChatGPT's actual response just 5.0% of the time and was cited as a source only 2.0%.
Think about what that means for the person reading the response. ChatGPT recommends a brand, and directly underneath sits an ad for someone else offering an alternative. Traditional search never created that moment, though AIOs are certainly starting to create a similar AI answer to ad tension.
[Check out our 2026 update on AI Overview impact on Google CTR for more on how AI is affecting traditional search.]
Depending on where your brand stands, that cuts two ways.
On one hand, if you are not showing up in the organic answer, the ad slot gives you a way into a query that matters to you while you build that visibility. If you are the brand being recommended, someone else's ad can now sit under your best moment.
Either way, the work is the same: getting your context targeting right so you are showing up on the prompts that actually fit. The advertisers winning early are treating this less like display inventory and more like search, using what they know about their prompts and their organic visibility to pick their spots. That gap between the ad and the answer is where we will be testing.
4. Half the ads are on-topic, but 20% are spray
We created a rubric to evaluate how aligned each ad was to the ChatGPT response above it. This lets us see how direct or out of touch an ad is, which hints at both the advertiser's strategy and how ChatGPT's targeting works.
Alignment averages 3.39 out of 5. Half the ads (50.1%) are on topic for the answer, 28.3% are category-adjacent, and 21.6% have no meaningful connection to the response.
Some buyers are treating ChatGPT Ads like display: going wide for impressions in front of what they hope is the right audience, even when the context is off. Think of it like a banner ad following you into an article it has nothing to do with. Monday.com is the clearest case, with the most ads in our dataset and a 2.7 average alignment, including 21 placements on law-firm related prompts.
Others are treating it like search. CrowdStrike concentrated its ads on data-security questions and landed a 3.6 average by picking its spots.
5. Aggregators already make up 16.2% of the ads
Affiliate and aggregator sites like BestMoney, Top10, and Insurify already make up 16.2% of the ads we saw, and they are placing them with high alignment: BestMoney (~4.0) and Top10 (~4.3) are more on topic than most of the direct brands beside them, with BestMoney owning banking and insurance prompts and Top10 owning education.
These are some of the same "best X" players who have been losing organic ground and citations for their listicle content. Now they are buying their way back into the answer through paid.
The open question is whether they’re outbidding everyone to protect their awareness in AI or if these are simply unclaimed by the brands. If it’s the former, this could make those placements expensive fast for the brands sitting next to them.
So what should brands do now?
The data is just 3 days old within the AI visibility tracker, but we’ve been piloting ChatGPT ads. Everything above is market data starts to form, testing from real campaigns doesn’t contradict those trends.
The action that data from the ChatGPT platform + the AI visibility trends informs: let the AI answer inform your ad campaign.
- Go look at your branded prompts today. Run the prompts that matter to your brand in a free ChatGPT account and see whose ad shows up. Right now the answer may be nobody, but the window where your branded prompts sit unclaimed will not stay open.
- Know what the answer says before you buy the space next to it. Your organic AI presence and your paid placements are now one conversation, so audit what ChatGPT actually says about you and your category first.
In one B2B client audit, we found zero content on ROI, pricing transparency, or competitive comparisons. Competitors owned all three in AI responses. Running ads on top of that would have had a negative brand impact, and wasted spend.
Read more about why you should track organic reputation as a part of your paid strategy here. - Go in with a testing plan, not just a budget. The risk is not the spend, it is spending it without structure and coming out with no real learning. Define what you are testing before you launch, like a display approach or a context aligned approach. Know what and why.
- Watch the platform week to week. Audience list targeting launched the same week we captured this data, and the creative formats are already shifting. What is true about ChatGPT ads this month may not be true next month.
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