ChatGPT shows ads. They sit below the answer, labelled as sponsored, in a conversation that had commercial intent.
The question every marketing budget now has to answer is whether money put there comes back. For a B2B software company the answer is more interesting than yes or no, because of who is on the other side of the screen.
What the placement actually is
One unit, below the answer, clearly marked. Not inside the answer, not woven into the text.
OpenAI's position is that advertising does not change what the assistant says. The ad is a separate object underneath it.
It is shown to logged in adults on the free and lower paid tiers. People on the higher personal plans and on business and enterprise plans do not see ads at all.
Read that last sentence again if you sell software to companies. The people who pay for a business seat are exactly the people who evaluate software for work, and they are outside the inventory.
You buy a situation, not a keyword
Search advertising is built on keywords. This is not.
An advertiser describes the conversations they want to appear in, in plain language. Which topics, which problems, which moment in a decision. The system decides whether a given conversation is a match.
There is no demographic targeting. You are not buying an audience, you are buying a context.
That has a real consequence for how you write the brief. A list of product keywords is the wrong input. A description of the situation a buyer is in when your product becomes the obvious answer is the right one.
What comes back, and what does not
You get aggregate numbers. Impressions, clicks, spend, click through rate, and conversions if you have instrumented them yourself.
You do not get the conversation. You do not get who the person was, what they asked, or which phrasing triggered your ad. That is a deliberate privacy boundary and it is not going to open up.
So the optimisation loop you are used to on search does not exist here. You cannot read the query report and cut the waste, because there is no query report.
Everything you learn has to come from what happens after the click, which means your own analytics and your own CRM have to be clean before you spend anything. If you cannot already tell which channel produced last quarter's meetings, this channel will not tell you either.
Why we are not quoting you a price
Every guide published this year quotes confident numbers for minimum budgets, cost per click and which countries are live. They do not agree with each other.
Some describe an enterprise channel bought through agencies with six figure commitments. Others describe a self serve account you can open with a card and a small daily budget. Some say one country, others list fifty.
The honest read is that the product changed several times during 2026 and a lot of published advice is describing a version that no longer exists.
Before you plan a budget, check the current terms at the source: OpenAI's own documentation on ads in ChatGPT. Any number in a blog post, including the ones we would have written here, is a snapshot of a moving thing.
What makes spend efficient here
Treat it as demand capture with a narrow mouth, not demand creation. It reaches someone already describing a problem out loud. That is valuable and it is a thin slice.
Write the context brief as a situation, in sentences. The team is three people, the founder is still closing every deal, they are entering a second market and nobody speaks the language. That is a context. Sales software is not.
Send the click to the page that answers the question in the conversation, never to the home page. A person who has just been given a three sentence answer will not go hunting through a navigation menu for the rest.
Instrument conversion tracking before the first euro, not after the first disappointing week.
Judge it on cost per qualified conversation, the same number you judge every other channel on. Not impressions, not clicks, not assisted anything.
Give it a fixed test budget and a decision date. A channel with no query report and thin attribution deserves a hard stop rather than a slow drift.
Who should wait
If you sell to enterprise IT, a meaningful share of your buying committee sits on plans that never show ads. You can still reach the researcher below them, and you should know that is who you are reaching.
If your sales cycle runs six months and your CRM cannot attribute a closed deal to a first touch, you will not be able to prove anything either way. Fix the measurement first, then buy the media.
If you have not done the work to be named inside the answer itself, do that first. The organic mention above the ad is not for sale, it is earned, and it is still the more valuable position. We set that work out on the SEO, GEO and AI visibility page.
If you want a channel plan that puts this in its place alongside search, LinkedIn and Meta, that is what our paid advertising work is, and the budgets are public on the marketing pricing page.