ChatGPT has asked 500 questions. Here are the ads you’ve seen most often

Free users are expensive for OpenAI. One of the biggest challenges you’ll face during this change is delivering ads at scale, without degrading trust or pushing users to competing chatbots, like Google’s Gemini or Anthropic’s Claude.

“It wouldn’t be easy for ChatGPT, for example, to erode quality of experience without losing a lot of users,” says Stefano Pontoni, a marketing professor at Wharton who researches generative AI. None of OpenAI’s major competitors feature sponsored ad buttons in the output, though Google recently said it’s not ruling it out.

Sometimes, when I asked a question that included a brand name in the prompt, like DoorDash or Netflix, the ad below the answer was for one of the company’s direct competitors. Toubia calls this “poaching” and says the technique has long been a staple of digital search engine advertising. “This has certainly been a major driver behind the growth of online advertising,” he says. “It seems that will be the case as well [large language model] propaganda.”

Right now, OpenAI is hiring for multiple positions, from software engineers to marketing leaders, to work on this core ad integration. One of the open positions on OpenAI’s website is “Product Marketing, Advertising Lead,” and part of the role’s responsibilities is to “identify product risk areas (e.g., performance, safety, policy, trust) and drive cross-functional plans to mitigate them.” Advertising comes with risks, and how it is implemented will shape the future of the company.

If I exclusively use the free tier of ChatGPT, presenting these ads will make me consider other AI tools. Even with OpenAI’s explicit advertising policies, there’s an aura of surveillance that these ads bring to the user experience, which is more personal with a chatbot than with the traditional Google search experience. Even though I know advertisers can’t currently influence ChatGPT’s output or see my conversations, the constant ads below answers made conversations feel less private, and I felt hyper-aware of the personal data I was sharing with this bot.

After this limited rollout in the US, OpenAI will move to the next phase. “We see no impact on consumer confidence metrics, lower ad rejection rates, and continued improvements in ad relevance as we learn from feedback. These positive signals support moving to the next phase of the pilot,” an update on the OpenAI website said on March 26. The company is expected to expand this advertising push to Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Everything is at stake for OpenAI as this announcement spreads to more ChatGPT users.

“The worst thing a company can do is step in too aggressively, and do it in a way that essentially maximizes conversions and referrals but at the same time undermines people’s trust in those recommendations,” Pontoni says. “After that, that will be the end of it, because there is no point in using a chat program that you do not trust.”