OpenAI’s decision to introduce ads in ChatGPT marks a major shift in how brands may appear inside AI-driven conversations. While paid placements will become part of the platform, organic visibility, authority, and trust signals will still play a critical role in how brands are surfaced and perceived. For B2B leaders, this change signals the need to think beyond traditional SEO and toward a blended strategy that combines AEO, organic AI visibility, and selective paid exposure inside conversational interfaces.
With the rise of artificial intelligence use, engaging with chatbots and prompting AI to organically promote your business has become a common marketing strategy, but with OpenAI’s recent decision to test ads in ChatGPT, implementing this strategy has become a lot more complex.
In the United States, OpenAI will be rolling out initial ad tests, starting with ChatGPT’s free tier for logged-in users, and ChatGPT’s Go tier, which offers more comprehensive features, and was recently introduced in the US at a rate of $8/month after running in a variety of other countries, including France and India. These ad tests will not be run on ChatGPT Plus, Pro or Enterprise.
What This Means for AI Search and Visibility
ChatGPT ads represent a new category of AI advertising that blends conversational search with paid brand placement.
For marketers, the implementation of ads doesn’t necessarily mean that knowing how to rank in AI search isn’t important, because it is expected that this will be foundational to the coming shift towards media plans and rate cards for direct AI advertising.
It is useful to think about your business’ past experience refining your data and brand messaging, and building your understanding of how to tailor your content to be interpreted in certain ways by LLMs, as practice and preparation. With the monetisation of the user intent that brands have been chasing, it is crucial to understand how to best identify when they should pay to be highlighted, and to be part of the conversation.
Space and Time’s AI and performance lead, Paula Hijosa, stresses that their Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) expertise will be utilized so that the platform understands your business, and consequently, your ad will appear in conversations that are relevant to your brand.
What Are ChatGPT Ads?
ChatGPT ads are paid placements that appear alongside AI-generated responses, designed to surface relevant brands without influencing the model’s organic answers.
OpenAI announced that ads will not be seamlessly integrated, but will show up underneath ChatGPT’s response to your query in its own labelled box, indicating that it is an ad. The answer ChatGPT provides to you will also not be influenced by this paid advertising, but the ad itself will likely be relevant to the topic that you are inquiring about.
Why Trust and Authority Matter in ChatGPT Advertising
Fidji Simo, OpenAI CEO of applications, detailed that maintaining the high degree of trust between ChatGPT users and the platform is important to keeping it a valuable resource, so making sure that the chatbot’s responses are prioritising what's most useful over advertising becomes a key part of preservation.
When it comes to the guidelines behind ChatGPT advertisements, there are clear terms that have been established by OpenAI. Firstly, there will be a restriction on the information that advertisers have made available to them, which includes advertisers not having access to user data like personal interests, location, age, and specific conversations between the user and the chatbot.
Additionally, OpenAI will not sell user data either. What advertisers will have access to is statistics having to do with user engagement through clicking on the ad or how often the ad is being presented to users, which are indicative of collective performance.
As far as serving the ads to users goes, your personalisation data may be utilised in tandem with the basic idea of presenting advertisements that are relevant to what specifically you have asked ChatGPT, but you are able to stop personal data from influencing the ads that you see by turning off this option.
The expanded memory features of ChatGPT means that it can use the previous data it has collected about you and your preferences from previous conversations, not only to influence future responses, but likely to influence which ads it deems relevant to you. You also will have the ability to indicate how often you would like to see ads in the future.
The Role of AEO, GEO, and Organic AI Visibility
When it comes to which brands will be most prevalently featured and deemed most relevant, AI optimization still has a large role to play. Organic LLM visibility is an indicator of high levels of AI trust and credibility, as well as category leadership.
The way in which organic references and paid ads will work together has to be seamless, so being well equipped in AEO practices will be extremely important so that each content type can enhance the other, and create the cohesive user experience that OpenAI is likely to prioritise.
There are many ways to establish your brand’s authority, but one of the best methods for AEO and SEO is producing high quality content that establishes your business’ expertise.
Building Authority in an AI World
As AI driven platforms like ChatGPT continue to evolve, authority and credibility are becoming just as important as visibility. One of the most effective ways to establish that authority is through consistent, high quality content that demonstrates expertise over time.
Podcasts, in particular, offer a powerful way to create long form insights that can be repurposed into blogs, social content, and short-form video, all from a single conversation. For B2B brands, this creates a scalable content system that supports SEO, AEO, and organic AI visibility without adding pressure to internal teams.
Balancing User Experience, Trust, and Advertising
User experience is a large point of concern for many, with the obvious impact that ads will have on the ChatGPT platform, and OpenAI has suggested that instead of negatively affecting how users engage with ChatGPT, there are actually opportunities for platform growth, and that the company’s main priority is still on usability and credibility, rather than trying to increase the duration of user engagement.
One of the key questions marketing teams are asking is whether this method of advertising is going to be conducive to brand growth, and this goes hand in hand with the concern about how these ads can be implemented in a way that enhances user experience rather than being disruptive.
ChatGPT ads, however, aren’t going to be promoted to everyone. An example of this is how there will not be ads appearing in connection to topics like mental health, general health and politics, which are all considered sensitive subjects.
Another instance is that users under the age of eighteen, or those who are believed to be minors, which is determined through either the user themself stating that this is the case, or through the age-prediction model OpenAI plans on implementing, will not be exposed to ads on ChatGPT.
How ChatGPT Advertising Is Expected to Evolve
The expected learning curve for ChatGPT marketing means that businesses are already considering potentially relevant questions like not only whether you will be bidding for your brand to be introduced into AI conversations, but about how involved the business will be. For example, will there be opportunities or competition to have your brand answer questions directly, and will what your brand is offering be directly accessible through the ChatGPT platform.
Adjusting to these new standards would mean having to implement an entirely new marketing strategy in regards to social media content, search ads and display ads. Further, the idea that commerce and service will become part of the ChatGPT advertising model, which was seemingly implied by OpenAI, would indicate the need for further changes to accommodate interactive ad experiences.
The opportunity to extend past traditional static messages and links as tools for engagement with your brand is more present than ever, considering that conversational interfaces present further possibilities for what is possible when it comes to advertising.
OpenAI has suggested that in the near future, users could be able to, without leaving the conversation that you are engaged in, see an ad and then ask questions that drive a buying decision. This would mean you could make key choices as a consumer all within the ChatGPT platform.
The implementation of ads by OpenAI comes as no surprise as the company’s next business move, seeing that ChatGPT continues to be an increasingly popular platform, yet out of its over800 million users per week, most don’t pay for the service, making OpenAI an outlier among businesses of such an extensive scale in not already utilising ads.
With a raise in competition that accompanies the development of other AI programs by other businesses, like Google Gemini, capitalising on ChatGPT’s expansive user base has become a priority, especially to compensate for the low level of revenue in comparison with the financial investments OpenAI has secured.
What ChatGPT Ads Mean for B2B Leaders
So what does OpenAI’s decision to bring ads to ChatGPT mean for you as a business leader? It means you need to start looking at artificial intelligence and AI marketing in a different way.
While your previous focus on SEO and AEO through the use of Generative Engine Optimization pilots may not seem like an effective marketing strategy anymore, it is important to recontextualize all of these past efforts when you consider which ads will be deemed as most trustworthy, since OpenAI is concerned primarily with upholding the authority and credibility of ChatGPT as an advisor that most users consider to have some aspect of objectivity.
ChatGPT ad trials mark another evolution in one of the most prevalent and widely talked about technologies today, and with this move towards emphasising financial gain, only time will tell how successful this latest innovation will prove to be.
For most B2B companies, the near term opportunity is not aggressive ad spend, but strengthening organic AI visibility so paid placements reinforce an already trusted presence.
What B2B Leaders Should Pay Attention to Now
While ChatGPT ads introduce a new paid channel, they do not replace the need for authority-driven content. In fact, brands that already demonstrate credibility, clarity, and category leadership are likely to benefit the most as paid and organic AI experiences unite.
For B2B leaders, the most important questions are not just whether to advertise inside ChatGPT, but:
How your brand is referenced organically in AI-generated answers
Whether your content is trusted enough to influence buying decisions
How paid placements reinforce, rather than contradict, organic visibility
In practice, this means that strong foundational content, clear positioning, and consistent thought leadership will continue to shape how AI systems interpret and surface your brand, with or without ads.
In Short: How ChatGPT Ads Change AI Marketing
ChatGPT ads will appear as clearly labelled placements, separate from AI responses
Paid ads will not influence ChatGPT’s organic answers
Trust, authority, and relevance remain central to visibility
Organic AI presence and paid ads are expected to work together
Brands with strong authority signals will likely benefit most over time
With this latest development in AI there are bound to be plenty of different opinions about the far reaching impacts of this change, so, let me know, what do you think about ChatGPT ads?
Written by Eva Geimer
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Jony Studios is a content marketing agency specializing in B2B podcasting and audiobook services. They have worked with many clients, from startups to larger organizations such as Penguin Random House, Amazon, University of Waterloo, Freakonomics Radio, and many others.
