How advertising inside ChatGPT works
A plain-English guide to ChatGPT's sponsored ads: what they look like, how targeting works, and who's already winning — backed by real captured data.
OpenAI began showing sponsored ads inside ChatGPT — short, cited product cards that appear beneath certain answers. Because there's no public ad library for them, most advertisers and analysts are flying blind. This is a plain-English guide to how ChatGPT advertising works, based on the 75,049 sponsored placements we've captured across 57 markets.
What a ChatGPT ad looks like
A ChatGPT ad is a sponsored card: a headline, a line of copy, and a link to the advertiser's site, marked as sponsored and tied to the specific question you asked. Unlike a search results page crowded with ads, ChatGPT typically shows one sponsored placement per answer — so winning it means owning that entire moment of intent.
The market, in numbers
Across our captured sample, a few thousand brands are already advertising, concentrated in high-intent commercial categories like fintech, SaaS, and home services.
How ChatGPT decides which ad to show
Advertisers don't buy keywords. They write a natural-language context hint describing the audience and situation their product fits, and OpenAI matches ads to live conversations by relevance to that hint. That's a fundamental shift from search: you're bidding on *meaning*, not exact strings.
Because targeting is written in plain language and hidden, we reverse-engineer it: from the real prompts a brand's ads appear on, we infer the audience, intent, topic and constraints they're bidding on — with an honest confidence score. We've done this for over 2,500 advertiser-market pairs.
Who is winning
Share of voice on ChatGPT is cleaner than on a search page: one ad per answer means one winner per intent. A handful of brands already dominate the most valuable questions.
We probe ChatGPT with realistic consumer prompts and capture the sponsored ad cards it returns — every creative, the triggering prompt, and the advertiser. Figures reflect our captured sample, not OpenAI's internal data. Explore the live ad library and market intelligence.