Liam Walsh
Liam is a Co-Director at Intelligency and heads up the agency's Digital Intelligence & Paid Social activity. Over the last decade, he has worked with brands from the world of sports such as Premier League clubs to entertainment such as Channel 4 and Disney.
ChatGPT Ads has hit $1 billion in annualised revenue in under 200 days. To put that in context, it took Google AdWords several years to reach comparable scale. OpenAI has built a meaningful advertising business at remarkable speed, and this week it expanded self-service access to India, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, meaning businesses in those regions can now launch campaigns directly through Ads Manager without routing the buy through an agency or managed-sales team. For marketers watching where audiences are spending their time and attention, this is a development worth taking seriously.
Why ChatGPT Ads Is a Different Kind of Advertising
The proposition OpenAI is building is fundamentally different from traditional search advertising. Rather than intercepting someone who has typed a keyword, ChatGPT Ads places your brand inside an active conversation. OpenAI describes its users as arriving already partway through a decision, comparing options, planning a purchase, researching a job change. An ad served in that moment is not interrupting a search result; it is entering an existing thought process. Ads are clearly labelled as sponsored and appear separately from ChatGPT’s answers, and OpenAI states that advertising does not influence what the AI tells users. Targeting is based on the content of the current conversation and, where users have consented, their broader interests and preferences.
The Numbers Behind the Platform
Tens of thousands of advertisers are already active on the platform, which is now live in more than 40 countries. The majority of campaigns run on cost-per-click or outcome-optimised bidding. OpenAI has pointed to early results from advertisers including one ecommerce brand that reportedly achieved a 3x return on ad spend over 28 days, and a technology partner that found over 80% of ad-driven ChatGPT traffic came from new customers. Small and medium-sized businesses represent a material share of total ad revenue, and international advertisers account for a growing proportion of spend.
The Regulatory Dimension for European Advertisers
Alongside the commercial expansion, the European Commission has designated ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine under the Digital Services Act, giving it the same enhanced regulatory status as Google Search and Bing. OpenAI now has until January 2027 to meet the additional obligations that come with that designation, covering areas including algorithmic risk assessment, protection of minors, and safeguarding users’ rights under EU law. For brands advertising into European markets through ChatGPT, this is worth monitoring. Increased regulatory scrutiny tends to bring greater transparency requirements, which in turn affects how platforms can target and how advertisers can measure. Getting familiar with the platform now, before those rules bed in, puts you in a stronger position than waiting to see how it develops.
