OpenAI is chasing advertising dollars. Can publishers cash in, too?
It looks like OpenAI is taking the “new year, new you” approach when it comes to its business strategy. To kick off 2026, the company announced it would soon introduce ads into ChatGPT—which was a bit of a surprise, considering CEO Sam Altman had previously said ads would be a “last resort” as a business model.
It’s hard to say how final a resort this is without looking at OpenAI’s balance sheet, but we do know the company is feeling the heat. After Google released Gemini 3 in the fall—which scored well on leaderboards, market share, and plaudits from the AI community—Altman declared a “code red” at OpenAI to ensure that ChatGPT is best in class. And as impressive as OpenAI’s fundraising has been, Google is a $4 trillion company. OpenAI needs all the resources it can get.
So ChatGPT users are getting ads. It’s a risky move, since there are strong indicators that consumers are wary of ads in AI answers. A report from Attest, a consumer research company, found that 41% of consumers trust AI search results more than paid search results, suggesting that AI users like that they don’t have to worry about ads in AI summaries, even if their accuracy may sometimes be questionable. Hallucinating is apparently less of an offense than selling out.
However, ads in AI experiences look increasingly like an inevitability. Consumers don’t love ads on TV or streaming either, but they’re endemic to the media ecosystem. Google is already serving ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and it may someday bring them to Gemini, too, although company executives deny there are any plans to do this. Regardless of what it does with the Gemini chatbot, Google appears determined to weave advertising into many of its AI experiences, which is hardly a shock.
Big Tech, bigger bite
For the media, this isn’t exactly thrilling news. OpenAI entering the ad business means yet another Big Tech player is competing with them for digital ad dollars alongside platforms like Google, Meta, and Amazon. And there’s less traffic to go around since those same AI chatbots summarize content, often negating the need to click through. There’s a reason web traffic to publishers dropped by a third last year.
However, advertising tied to AI answers might end up being exactly the leverage publishers need to make their case for compensation. When a publisher’s content is used to create the answer to a query, the line back to revenue is always somewhat indirect—after all, the user likely subscribed to the chatbot well before they ever typed their question, and most AI services have a free tier anyway. But if your content fuels an answer, and that answer directly leads to revenue for the AI company through either impressions or transactions, the chain from content to dollars is clearer.
It’s also more trackable than it’s ever been. Whereas the world of SEO inferred a lot from search terms and clicks, queries in AI search are more specific, and the tools much better at pinning down intent. Understanding which answers, and what content within them, best facilitate transactions is a very knowable thing.
OpenAI did its best to quash fears about commercialization by stating its first principles of advertising, one of them being that ads will not influence the substance of the answers in ChatGPT. The idea is that if, say, Coca-Cola pays for an ad campaign, then any answer will not be any more or less likely to mention Coke than if that campaign didn’t exist. But I wonder if the answer might be more or less inclined to steer the user toward buying a soft drink in general, with the ad providing a little card for you to tap on that does just that.
Optimize and persuade
Even if OpenAI insists that won’t happen, it can’t speak for all the brands and content providers that fuel the answer. How successful such efforts might be is extremely unclear at this point, but it’s a safe bet they’re going to try. The nascent field of GEO (generative engine optimization) seems destined to give rise to a new dimension—not just how content affects AI answers, but how it convinces users to take action. You’re not just optimizing for presence, but also for persuadability.
All of this is theoretical, of course, and perhaps Google, OpenAI, and everyone else will succeed in keeping the ad-revenue pie all to themselves. But as revenue from AI answers increases, every marketer on the planet will want to know which answers are the most lucrative, and what content they’re made from. If publishers can prove they’re providing the secret sauce, they’ll have more leverage in demanding their slice.
Proving that value is not trivial. Successful bargaining over this “content-to-click” effect starts with measuring it, and that’s going to take work. Understanding how content appears in and affects AI answers is brand-new science, but it is science: Experimentation, iteration, and leveraging different kinds of tools—like snippets, bot blocking, and dedicated GEO platforms—are what’s needed.
Over the past 25 years, Silicon Valley slowly built tremendous platforms that ended up consuming the vast majority of advertising revenue, locking out the media in the process. And let’s be honest: There’s a good chance artificial intelligence will end up continuing that trend. But the irony of monetizing AI answers with advertising is that it may end up creating the best opportunity for publishers to define exactly how much value they bring to them.