OpenAI Begins Testing Ads Inside ChatGPT. What It Means for Marketers

If you work in digital marketing, this shouldn’t surprise you.

OpenAI has begun testing ad formats in ChatGPT, something we all knew was coming.

When a platform captures attention at scale, monetisation follows. We’ve seen it with Google. We’ve seen it with Meta. We’ve seen it with TikTok. Now AI interfaces are next.

Which begs the question(s) - How effective will they be? When will they arrive in Australia? How will this impact digital media? If/how will it impact traditional media? But first...

Why Chat GTP Ads Matters

ChatGPT has become an integral part in the consumer journey. How we research, when, where, has fundamentally changed.

Consumers are:

• Researching products

• Comparing services

• Asking for recommendations

• Planning purchases

• Shortlisting vendors

And increasingly, they’re doing this without clicking through ten blue links.

If ads enter that environment, the digital battlefield will evolve significantly from what we know, which is competing in search results, social feeds, or programmatic.

The Shift From Keywords to Context

Traditional paid search is built on keywords.

AI interfaces are built on context.

Instead of bidding on:

“best CRM for small business”

Users are asking:

“What’s the best CRM for a 5-person B2B sales team in Australia with a $500/month budget?”

That’s layered intent. Long tail, voice activated search, consumers are evolving and expanding their willingness to adopt a new wave of discoverability.

If ads are inserted into AI responses, in order to be effective, they’ll need to feel native, helpful and relevant to the full context.

Businesses with the following will get ahead:

• Clear positioning

• Strong product-market fit

• Structured, machine-readable content

• Brands with authority

What This Means for Businesses

If you’re relying purely on:

• SEO rankings

• Google Search campaigns

• Meta retargeting

You’re exposed.

The next 12–24 months will be about:

1. Structuring your content for AI discoverability

2. Building brand authority

3. Preparing for paid placements inside AI environments

The Bigger Picture

We’re watching the unbundling of traditional search.

Traffic will fragment across:

• Google AI Overviews

• ChatGPT

• Perplexity

• Voice interfaces

• Embedded AI assistants

The brands that win won’t be the ones with the biggest budgets.

They’ll be the ones with:

• Clear value propositions

• Clean data structures

• Strong first-party data

• Smart paid distribution strategy

The fundamentals still matter. The interface is what’s changing.

My View

This is not the death of search.

It’s the evolution of paid media.

If you manage serious budgets (six to seven figures annually), you should already be thinking about:

• How AI will affect your top-of-funnel discovery

• Whether your brand is positioned clearly enough to be recommended

• How attribution models will shift

• Where you’re over-reliant on one channel

The marketers who treat this as noise will be playing catch-up.

The ones who lean in early will have leverage.

If you want to talk through what this means for your acquisition strategy in 2026, reach out.

The platforms are changing.

The fundamentals of performance marketing aren’t.

But you need to adjust before the market forces you to.