ChatGPT Ads Yield $0.89 Per Session Versus Google's $2.45

ChatGPT Ads generated $0.89 in revenue per US session across 102 advertiser sites, compared with $2.45 for Google search ads, according to a working paper by e-commerce researchers Maximilian Kaiser and Christian Schulze. The finding lands roughly nine months after OpenAI launched its ad platform, which has since scaled to more than 100,000 testing advertisers and a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate as of this summer.

The gap, not the novelty, is what concerns the researchers. "What makes us cautious about 'it will come with time' is the size of the gap," Kaiser and Schulze said over email.

What do the performance numbers show?

Adthena, a search intelligence platform, shared results from 30 enterprise brands covering July through September. Its data show 52% of advertisers struggled to recoup their ChatGPT ad spend. Another 26% matched or beat Google ads, and the remainder reported mixed results.

A counterpoint exists. OpenAI published a case study in October from the note-taking app Evernote, which found ChatGPT Ads delivered a trial-to-paid conversion rate roughly 10% to 20% above the company's historical average across paid-acquisition channels earlier that year.

Advertiser sentiment reflects the ambiguity. Twilio CMO Chris Koehler said: "We've dabbled in it." Intuit CMO Thomas Ranese described his company as "experimenting."

Why can't brands reach their audience?

OpenAI's ad business faces three structural limits: the size of ChatGPT's free user base, the scarcity of ad-relevant conversations, and the ceiling on how many ads users will tolerate before abandoning the product.

Dave Dugan, OpenAI's head of global ad solutions, told CMO Insider in a June interview that ad delivery and volume had improved as the company's confidence in the ChatGPT Ads user experience grew. Brands still struggle to appear at scale.

"It's really hard for these LLMs to find audience," Qualcomm CMO Don McGuire said. "Unless it's super, super broad, targeting is not really happening right now, so that really begs the ROI question."

Kaiser and Schulze suggest one fix: moving ads from cards alongside conversations to placements inside the answers themselves. OpenAI's ad principles rule this out — they state ads will not influence ChatGPT's answers and that user experience outranks revenue.

Can measurement fix the ROI question?

Adthena CMO Ashley Fletcher called measurement a "sore point" for marketers on ChatGPT. OpenAI has introduced a measurement pixel and conversion bidding, letting advertisers set a target cost per acquisition or cost per click.

Fletcher said the tools will give CMOs better numbers to model, but he worries what those numbers will reveal. Cleaner measurement may show ChatGPT ads mostly "nudge people" at the first stage of brand consideration — far from the quick conversions advertisers expect from other platforms. He named Black Friday as a key test.

Who is scaling already?

Some marketers report wins. Natural Intelligence, which operates comparison sites including Top10.com and BestMoney.com, has moved ChatGPT Ads from its test budget to its "growth budget," a category where investment scales with performance, according to head of strategy Jonathan Vardi.

Vardi's method is specific: his team lists the pain points each product solves and turns those into targeted ads that appear as users ask ChatGPT tricky questions. Feeding accurate conversion data back to the platform is decisive, he said.

"If you don't tell ChatGPT what users are doing on your site after they click your ad, you're not allowing the ads algorithm to learn which users actually engage with what you have to offer and become paying customers," Vardi said. "Stopping at views or clicks really constrains your ROI now that there's more competition on the channel."

Hans Fischmann, VP of product at adtech company AdRoll, said his company tags every ChatGPT ad and uses the data to inform the broader media buy. "Someone asks ChatGPT about a hotel on Tuesday, and sees that brand on their TV Thursday," Fischmann said. "That's the full-funnel play, and it's what earns ChatGPT a permanent spot on the plan."

What does this change for advertisers? ChatGPT Ads now rewards those who report conversions rigorously and treat the channel as an upper-funnel signal rather than a direct-response engine — and Black Friday's data will show whether that is enough.