About four months since ChatGPT launched its self-serve ad platform, it’s becoming clear that brands are investing significantly in the nascent ad channel.
We ran almost 4,000 unique prompts daily on ChatGPT for four weeks. Over that time, ChatGPT served us more than 230,000 ads from more than 3,000 brands.
How often do ads appear?
As with all behaviors of probabilistic models, it depends on what you ask.
When we ran shopper-like prompts that included phrases like “where to buy” and “best deals” or price terms like “under $300,” ads showed up in 72% of responses on average. When we asked instead about product qualities - most comfortable car, best personal loan company based on customer service, etc. - ads appeared in only about 13% of responses on average.
It also depends on what you ask about. Topics related to pharmaceutical products produced less than half as many ads as other topics like cars, hotels and banking services. That’s likely due to regulations and rules governing pharmaceutical products. For example, OpenAI policy prohibits ads with certain types of medical claims, unapproved medical products, “health-related products that exploit body-image concerns, distress, or other vulnerabilities” and more.
Who’s advertising?
Ads from about 3,200 brands appeared in our sample of responses. SoFi, Expedia and BestMoney were the biggest ad spenders overall.
Our prompts spanned 70 topics, equally distributed into five categories: automotive, B2B SaaS, finance, pharmaceuticals and travel. Brands in some of these categories enjoyed a much bigger lead over competitors than the overall picture suggests.
No brand enjoyed a bigger ad share within a category than SoFi in finance (32%), while no brand boasted a bigger lead over the next biggest advertiser than Expedia in travel (more than three times the share of Turo). In automotive and B2B SaaS, meanwhile, the battle to be the top advertiser was too close to call with the top two advertisers separated by less than a percentage point.
In pharmaceuticals, the particularities of what is permitted again likely produced some oddities in that category. The top advertisers were meal-kit delivery service Hungryroot, which advertised things like “heart-smart med diet,” and Top10.com, which advertised product comparisons of weight-loss drugs.
Where ChatGPT ads go next
OpenAI first rolled out ads to users in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada on Free and Go plans. This week, the company massively expanded the ads program to 31 countries in Europe. OpenAI also announced this week that it will begin showing ads in India.
The company has also been working to improve the advertising platform itself. It has added geo-targeting and custom audiences as well as the OpenAI Pixel, Conversions API and third-party measurement integrations. Additionally, OpenAI is reportedly working on exclusion targeting, an offering that would allow advertisers to target the contexts in which they do not want their ads to appear.
Methodology
Evertune tracks thousands of brands across LLMs by running millions of prompts a day. For this analysis, we reviewed about 2 million ChatGPT responses to 3,850 unique prompts spanning July 22 to August 19. Prompts were evenly spread across 14 topics per category for five categories: automotive, B2B SaaS, finance, pharmaceuticals and travel.
Evertune is the first Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) platform built to explore, measure, act and advertise across the entire AI customer journey, connecting brands directly to ChatGPT Ads and programmatic advertising partners like The Trade Desk and Index Exchange. Where most GEO tools sample each prompt once a day, Evertune samples every prompt 100 times per model across 11+ AI models, delivering statistically significant visibility data at half the cost of competing platforms. Evertune's agents do the work for you: a prompt agent mines over 150 million real user conversations to find the exact questions buyers ask, an insights agent tells you what to do next each week, and an ads agent builds a complete ChatGPT campaign around your visibility gaps. From there, Evertune closes the loop with website optimization, data-driven content creation, source-level influence mapping and paid activation through affiliate and programmatic AI retargeting partners. Founded by the team that pioneered programmatic advertising at The Trade Desk, now building the next marketing channel.
