Adthena’s 8 predictions for ChatGPT ads

Last week OpenAI confirmed plans to introduce advertising into ChatGPT’s free and entry-level offerings, marking one of the most significant new ad network launches in recent years. This shift aims to fund broader access while balancing user experience, privacy, and commercialisation. Early leaks and platform signals suggest ads will be embedded thoughtfully around conversational queries, opening a new frontier for advertisers.

As the recognised leader in AI-driven search intelligence, Adthena is uniquely positioned to bring clarity and actionable insight to this emerging ecosystem. With our technology already adapting to index and analyse these new ad formats, enterprise advertisers can confidently navigate performance, benchmarks, and strategy in this evolving landscape.

OpenAI will keep ads clearly separated from ChatGPT’s core conversational and agentic experiences such as Retail. Merging monetisation with autonomous task execution would introduce risk, complexity, and trust erosion too early. Expect ads to sit in distinct moments of discovery or consideration, enabling cleaner measurement, clearer user intent, and more controlled experimentation. This separation makes it easier for OpenAI to scale ads incrementally without compromising the conversational experience users value.

Enterprise advertisers will move quickly to test ChatGPT ads, even if early traffic volumes are modest. This mirrors past behavior seen with emerging platforms, where presence and learning outweigh immediate ROI. For many brands, this is about future-proofing awareness and consideration strategies in a shifting consumer journey. CMOs will not want to be seen as absent from what may become a foundational discovery channel.

Initial ad formats are likely to deliver conservative click-through rates, especially given their subtle placement within conversational flows. However, the value will come from when ads appear, not how often they are clicked. Ads triggered mid-journey – when users are refining needs or comparing options – may carry low intent and lower converting clicks versus someone who has entered multiple prompts, refined results and then seen an ad.

Driving users away from ChatGPT too aggressively creates tension with its core value proposition: staying in conversation. OpenAI will need to balance advertiser outcomes with session depth and user retention. Expect ad designs and calls to action that feel assistive rather than extractive. This tension will shape ad formats, frequency, and placement, and will likely cap how aggressive early monetisation can be.

As with many new ad ecosystems, early reporting will likely be high-level and aggregated. Advertisers should not expect granular query-level transparency or impression share insights initially. Instead, performance may be grouped into broader matched impression or exposure metrics. This creates a critical role for independent intelligence platforms to provide external benchmarking, competitive context, and deeper visibility beyond what the platform itself exposes.

With limited inventory and subtle placements, creative differentiation will be the primary lever for performance. Headline length constraints and image usage will play an outsized role in standing out within conversational interfaces. Advertisers will need to understand how visuals are sourced and rendered, and how messaging complements AI-generated responses. Learning which creative approaches resonate will be a key early advantage.

Despite uncertainty around scale, competition will arrive fast. Brands across verticals will rush to establish presence, driving crowded auctions and limited visibility from day one. Standing out will not be about spend alone, but about understanding prompt context, user intent, and competitive messaging. This is where search intelligence becomes critical – helping advertisers see how, where, and why competitors are appearing.

The most valuable insight will be understanding what prompts trigger ads. Prompt structure, language, and intent signals will define visibility, much like keywords once did. Advertisers will urgently seek transparency into which prompt patterns unlock opportunities and which do not. Indexing, analysing, and benchmarking prompt-level ad triggers will become foundational to strategy – creating a new frontier for search intelligence.

Our technical and product teams have already deployed resources to both index and build market-leading insights for ChatGPT Ads. Stay tuned for further updates.