Advertisers that left ChatGPT: 10 brands gone dark

As of August 2026, ten advertisers with thousands of lifetime ChatGPT placements have not appeared in our last 30 days of capture. Three of them, Mastercard, Cloudflare, and SAP, sit inside the all-time top 15. We track last-seen dates, not spend, so this is a gone-dark list, not a churn claim.

The gone-dark list, and how we build it

Our movers data flags any advertiser that showed up in the prior 90 days but missed the trailing 30. The trigger is observation, not spend, so the list is a clean signal that the brand is no longer buying, or has paused, on ChatGPT. Anything we have not seen in the last 30 days goes on it. The 30-day window keeps the list responsive without flagging brands that take a normal weekly break, and across our 5,486 tracked advertisers, only a small fraction meets the bar in any given month, which is why the list is short and the entries are heavy.

Three top-15 advertisers are on the list

The sharpest finding is that the gone-dark list overlaps the top of the cumulative leaderboard. Mastercard at 3,490 lifetime appearances (3.04% share), Cloudflare at 2,633 (2.29%), and SAP at 1,262 (1.10%) all rank inside the all-time top 15 and have not appeared in the trailing 30 days. Three of fifteen is 20%, a heavy concentration of historical dominance concentrated in advertisers who are now quiet. The very top of a static leaderboard is partly a museum of who used to advertise, not who is advertising today.

Who's filling the gap

In the same 30-day window, twelve brands appeared in ChatGPT placements for the first time. The largest launches are Lemonade at 124 placements, Darktrace at 71, and Wiz at 69, with most of the remaining entrants sitting between 48 and 56 placements. The list mixes insurance, security tooling, and consumer categories, which suggests the inventory is being reallocated rather than lost, and that newer advertisers are willing to test the channel at non-trivial volume from day one.

What the churn pattern suggests

The gone-dark list skews toward enterprise software and infrastructure. Mastercard, Cloudflare, SAP, Mixpanel, Inc, ClickUp, and Sitetracker Inc all sell into technical or financial buyers. The new entrants skew toward insurance (Lemonade, SMARI), security tooling (Darktrace, Wiz, Expel), and consumer retail (Harbor Freight). For enterprise software buyers, the channel may be less crowded than the cumulative leaderboard suggests. For insurance, security, and consumer retail, the channel is heating up, and the new entrants' volume indicates willingness to bid. The data proves presence only, not the advertiser's reasoning, so treat the pattern as a starting hypothesis rather than a conclusion.

Our capture only sees placements ChatGPT serves to the prompts we run. A brand that has narrowed its targeting to verticals we don't sample, or shifted to a creative format we don't render, would show up as gone dark even if it is still spending. Treat the entries as 'not observed in 30 days of our capture' rather than as a verdict on intent, and check the live directory before drawing conclusions. The list is therefore a floor on activity, not an exact count of paused accounts.

For real-time tracking of which advertisers are spending on ChatGPT today and which have gone quiet, browse the full advertiser directory or open a deeper view through our intelligence feed. The gone-dark status updates daily, and each advertiser page shows the last-seen date alongside cumulative placement counts so you can sort active from dormant without re-running the analysis.