ChatGPT Now Has Ads. The AI Industry Will Never Be the Same.

It was only a matter of time. On February 9, OpenAI flipped the switch and started showing ads inside ChatGPT. If you're a free-tier or Go subscriber in the U.S., you might've already seen them — small, labeled placements from brands like Best Buy, Expedia, Qualcomm, and Enterprise Mobility tucked into the chatbot's responses. It's a quiet launch, almost surgical in its restraint. But make no mistake: this is the most consequential business decision OpenAI has made since launching ChatGPT itself. ## What's Actually Happening The ads are showing up as sponsored content within ChatGPT conversations. They're visually separated from the AI's answers and clearly labeled. According to OpenAI's own blog post, the company matches ads to the topic of your conversation, your past chats, and your previous interactions with ads. Ask about travel plans, you might see an Expedia placement. Shopping for a laptop? Best Buy's got a spot waiting. Search intelligence firm Adthena analyzed over 500 prompts and found ads appeared in roughly 0.8% of responses. That's not a typo — less than one percent. The brands surfacing so far are a small, curated group. Best Buy and Enterprise Mobility confirmed their participation to Adweek. The Knot Worldwide, the wedding planning company, is also running placements. Expedia and Qualcomm haven't commented publicly. OpenAI's ads and monetization lead, Asad Awan, told Adweek the company is "thoughtfully testing new ad experiences" and wants to "ensure ads are separate and clearly distinct, relevant, and useful." The language is careful. It should be. ## The Price of Entry This isn't a self-serve ad platform where any small business can throw $50 at a campaign. OpenAI is charging a minimum of $200,000 to participate in the pilot. Some clients represented by Adthena were approached for $250,000. That's premium, gatekeeper-level pricing — and it tells you exactly how OpenAI views this product. They're not trying to build Google Ads overnight. They're building an exclusive advertising club and handing out memberships to Fortune 500 companies first. The big holding companies are already in. Omnicom Media told Adweek that more than 30 of its clients have secured placements. WPP and Dentsu are running brands including Adobe, Audible, Ford, Mazda, and Audemars Piguet through early tests. Mrs. Meyer's, the cleaning supplies brand, is in there too. It's an eclectic lineup that suggests OpenAI is testing across categories rather than locking into one vertical. Pro, Plus, Business, Enterprise, and Education subscribers won't see ads. If you're paying $20 a month or more, you're in the clear. Free and Go users — the vast majority of ChatGPT's hundreds of millions of users — are the ones who'll encounter them. OpenAI frames this as a tradeoff: ads help fund free access to more powerful features. You can also opt out of ads on the free tier, but doing so means fewer daily messages. That's a choice, but it's not exactly a generous one. ## The Google Parallel Everyone's Thinking About There's a reason this story feels familiar. In the early 2000s, Google made a similar bet — that it could insert advertising into search results without destroying the product people loved. For years, Google's ads were small, text-based, and clearly marked. They worked because they were relevant. People searching for "running shoes" didn't mind seeing an ad for running shoes. Then the ads grew. They multiplied. They started looking more and more like organic results. And over two decades, Google built a $300 billion annual advertising machine that fundamentally shaped how the internet works — and how much of it we can trust. OpenAI is standing at the same crossroads, just with a conversational interface instead of a search bar. The pitch is identical: ads can be "uniquely valuable" because people use ChatGPT when they're "actively exploring options, comparing ideas, or working toward a decision." In those moments, OpenAI argues, a well-placed ad isn't an interruption — it's a recommendation. That's a compelling argument. It's also exactly what Google said. ## The Trust Problem Here's where things get tricky. ChatGPT isn't a search engine. People don't use it to browse a list of links. They use it to get answers — often a single, definitive answer to a specific question. When you ask ChatGPT "what's the best hotel in Barcelona," you're trusting it to give you an honest recommendation. Not a sponsored one. OpenAI insists that "ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you." The company says answers are "optimized based on what's most helpful" and that ads are always visually separated. But the structural tension is real. When an ad from Expedia appears right below ChatGPT's travel recommendation, does the average user process those as two distinct things? Or does the proximity itself create an implicit endorsement? This is a harder problem than Google ever faced. Search results were always understood to be a list of options. AI chatbot responses carry an air of authority — they feel like advice from a knowledgeable friend. Putting a sponsored placement next to that advice is playing with a different kind of trust. And there's the privacy dimension. OpenAI says advertisers don't get access to your chats, history, memories, or personal details. They only receive aggregate performance data. The company also says it won't show ads near sensitive topics like health, mental health, or politics, and won't serve them to users under 18. These are reasonable guardrails for a pilot. But pilots become products, and guardrails have a way of shifting when revenue targets get ambitious. ## What This Means for the AI Industry OpenAI didn't just start selling ads. It validated a business model that every AI company has been eyeing but few have had the nerve to launch. If ChatGPT can run ads without a user revolt, expect Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, and every other chatbot to explore the same path. The economics make it almost inevitable. Running large language models is absurdly expensive. OpenAI reportedly spent over $5 billion on compute in 2025 alone. Subscriptions help, but they cap out — there are only so many people willing to pay $20 or $200 a month for a chatbot. Advertising is the revenue model that scales with usage, and ChatGPT has an enormous amount of usage to monetize. But this also creates a competitive opening. If you're Anthropic or another AI company, "we don't show ads" just became a meaningful differentiator. The same way DuckDuckGo carved out a niche against Google by promising privacy, ad-free AI assistants could attract users who don't want their conversations turned into advertising inventory. ## The 0.8% That Matters The low ad frequency — 0.8% of responses — is telling. OpenAI is being genuinely careful here, at least for now. They're testing at a scale so small that most users won't even notice. That's smart. It lets them gather data, refine the format, and build advertiser relationships without triggering a backlash. But 0.8% is a floor, not a ceiling. The $200,000 minimums and holding-company partnerships aren't being set up for a product that stays at one ad per 125 conversations. OpenAI has a path mapped out — "additional formats, objectives and buying models" are coming, per the company's own words. The question isn't whether ads will become more prominent in ChatGPT. It's how fast. Sam Altman once said OpenAI's mission was to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. On February 9, that mission got a new stakeholder: the advertiser. Whether ChatGPT can serve both its users and its sponsors without compromising either is the defining business question in AI right now. The answer will shape more than OpenAI's bottom line. It'll determine what kind of relationship we're all building with the AI tools we're increasingly relying on to think, plan, and decide. And if history's any guide, the first ads are always the easy part. It's what comes after that changes everything.