AI Ads: What You Actually Need to Know
OpenAI recently hosted a webinar diving into their new ChatGPT Ads platform. If you’re like me and not typically a webinar person, take a look at our short and sweet summary of the core concepts they shared (skipping the signup / setup), followed by a few thoughts on what this actually means for your brand. And why paying for ads isn't the only (or best) way to get noticed by AI.
The Short & Sweet Takeaways
The AI Use Case is Expanding: People are using ChatGPT for a wide range of goals: discovering, creating, planning, learning, and solving problems. This provides incredibly rich, deep conversational context compared to a standard Google search.
The Journey Lives in the Chat: AI is heavily involved from initial customer discovery all the way to purchase and beyond. Brands now have a large window to influence users while they are actively comparing, evaluating, and deciding.
The Scale is Massive: With 1 billion weekly active users, OpenAI's message to brands was clear: if you don’t show up, you don't sell.
Cross-Chat Targeting: Ads aren't just triggered by a single prompt. The platform looks at the broader conversations a user has been discussing to decide which ads to surface. This means an ad from one chat about kitchen appliances might appear in another about researching your European vacation.
Brand Safety & Trust: Ads are clearly separated from AI responses. OpenAI claims strong safeguards, stating ads will not appear in "brand unsafe," sensitive, health, or highly personal conversations.
Do You Really Need Ads?
Fundamentally, I agree with OpenAI's core premise that people are increasingly using AI to drive their buying experiences in both B2B and consumer spaces (and they have the data to back it up).
They also emphasized that the customer journey has already shifted to be consolidated largely within AI chats, something else I completely agree with.
This affirms what we've been talking about: your website and traditional marketing tactics matter less and less as you are no longer fully owning your relationship with your customer. The way that OpenAI (or Gemini, Claude, etc.) index and understand your content determines how well you show up during your target customer’s journey. Or if you show up at all.
OpenAI is saying all the right things about trust, relevance, and intent for ad placement. But, I have a few reservations:
Cross-Conversation Ads: I don’t love the idea of ads surfacing across different prompt conversations. If I'm using a chat to find a Christmas gift for my husband, I really don't want that ad popping up later when we're looking at a chat about our taxes.
The "Sensitive" Black Box: They emphasize not showing ads in personal or sensitive conversations to protect the user and the brand. But I have deep questions about what criteria they are actually using to determine those boundaries.
The Audience Limitation: These ads are limited to just a segment of users (Free and Go plans). Why pay to reach a limited audience when you could optimize organically to show up for everyone, regardless of their plan, geography, or even which AI model they use?
Personally, I don’t love a heavy ad spend, so I tend to lean toward organic optimization strategies first.
I'm not giving ChatGPT Ads a hard "don't do it” (it is a valid visibility option for certain brands), but if you’re a small to medium-sized business trying to figure out your AI strategy, I wouldn’t recommend it as your first step.
So, What Is the First Step?
Before you spend your budget on AI ads, you need to manage your machine readability.
Stop thinking about a list of keywords you want to rank for and start explicitly defining the core facts and solutions your business provides. Put your most definitive answers front and center, cutting out the fluffy, 500-word backstories, so your content is clear, concise, and structured for AI to easily cite.
You have to give machines your "Knowledge Layer." Translate your core identity, services, and differentiators into undeniable, machine-readable facts so the AI isn't left guessing.
Then, instead of just checking Google Analytics, start monitoring your perception to match user intent. Track how AI engines respond to the messy, real-world problems your customers are typing into prompts (exactly what OpenAI is using for ad placement). Find the gap between how you want to be seen and how AI actually describes you, and close it.
This is exactly why we built AKINOS, to help organizations structure their Knowledge, Intent, and Action layers so they don't have to rely on ad spend just to be discovered.
If you take away nothing else away from this: build your foundation first.
Editor's Note: The ideas, opinions, and core text in this article are 100% human. Generative AI was used as a co-writer to help format, structure, and polish the final draft.