ChatGPT Ads Are Here. How Challenger Brands Win Anyway
ChatGPT just announced paid placements, and early testing is already underway. From what I'm seeing, initial access is going to large CPG brands with the budgets to absorb launch-phase pricing (roughly $60 CPMs) — notably without a clear measurement framework, guaranteed ROI or brand safety controls. This isn't a mature ad ecosystem yet. It's an access play.
But here's what most people are missing: this isn't just about ads showing up inside AI. What's actually changing is where influence happens.
Most ad platforms — Google, Amazon, Meta — operate inside an existing funnel. The shopper has already decided to search or buy, and ads compete for position among options.
AI works earlier. It doesn't return a list — it returns an answer. And answers don't just influence choice; they shape framing: which categories, brands, and solutions even get considered before someone ever hits search or retail.
Until now, AI visibility (AEO) has been driven almost entirely by earned signals: clear positioning, consistency across the web, and whether a brand is understood as a credible answer to a specific question. As I've written before, ChatGPT already recommends competitors based on what it understands — not who spends the most (or who has the most clever tagline or splashy social campaign). Note: ChatGPT and Claude can't scrape social content or video formats effectively so influencers (and brands that rely heavily on content) are SOL here too.
Here's the more interesting part:
These ads won't look like search or social (see image). Early reporting suggests paid placements inside ChatGPT will be native, conversational, and integrated directly into answers — not clearly labeled slots you can simply outbid competitors for.
That changes the game.
My prediction:
Once this levels out, AI advertising will look much less like search or social — and much more like the Amazon flywheel.
Organic signals will still do the heavy lifting: relevance, clarity, consistency, and whether the system understands what problem you solve. Paid placements will amplify that relevance, not replace it. And just like Amazon, larger brands with bigger budgets will often over-index on paid, because organic signals are messier, harder to diagnose, and clunkier to fix.
That creates opportunity.
When ads look like answers, clarity beats spend — at least at first. Challenger brands don't win by outspending incumbents. They win by being legible to the model before relevance becomes pay-to-play.
Right now, challengers can still punch above their weight by:
Being unambiguous about the category they play in and the problem they solve
Ensuring brand, product, and expertise signals are consistent across indexable surfaces
Owning conversational long-tail questions — the specific, high-intent queries larger brands ignore
Claiming their comparison set — being mentioned alongside the right competitors and alternatives
Locking in answers to a small set of high-intent questions before those answers become sponsored
This is the same pattern we've seen every time a new channel opens: early advantage goes to the brands that are clearest, not the loudest. Once paid placement matures, the cost of entry goes up — and the advantage shifts to whoever prepared early.
That's why AEO right now isn't about ads. It's about earning relevance before relevance is something you have to buy.
If you want to pressure-test how legible your brand actually is to these systems, I built a quick 5-minute AI Visibility Test to show whether you're showing up in AI answers and how you're being described.
And if you're serious about getting ahead of this shift, I'm offering a limited number of AEO Readiness Assessments to identify gaps, competitive exposure, and what to fix while the field is still open.
The smartest move right now isn't to chase ads (especially at those CPM prices—yeesh!). It's to build the signals that make ads efficient later.
