AI Advertising: What Marketers Can Actually Buy Today

How Does Advertising in ChatGPT Work?

OpenAI’s Ads Manager increasingly resembles the digital advertising platforms marketers are accustomed to using. Advertisers can create campaigns, establish budgets, upload creative and landing pages, monitor results and adjust campaigns.

Campaign objectives currently include Views, Clicks and Conversions.

Views campaigns are optimized for exposure and use CPM billing. Clicks campaigns optimize for traffic and use CPC billing. Conversion campaigns optimize delivery toward a conversion action, but advertisers are still charged based on clicks or impressions.

But one of the more interesting differences between ChatGPT advertising and conventional search advertising is context.

Advertisers can provide what OpenAI calls context hints. These describe what a product or service does, who might benefit from it and situations in which it might be relevant.

They aren’t simply keywords, and providing a context hint doesn’t guarantee that an ad will appear.

Imagine an office furniture company.

In Google Ads, the company might target searches such as: “ergonomic office chairs.”

A ChatGPT conversation could be much richer:

“We’re moving our 30-person company into a new office. Several employees have complained about back pain, and we want adjustable chairs that will last for years. What should we look for?”

ChatGPT could answer the question by discussing lumbar support, adjustability, seat depth, materials and other considerations.

Below that answer, an eligible user might see a clearly labeled advertisement from an office furniture company.

The company hasn’t paid to have ChatGPT recommend its chair. It has paid for an opportunity to appear alongside a conversation that demonstrates relevant intent.

That is a subtle but potentially important difference.

OpenAI Is Already Experimenting with What Comes Next

OpenAI isn’t stopping with conventional sponsored placements.

In September 2026, the company announced additional advertising capabilities, including AI-assisted campaign creation, automated creative suggestions and integrations with HubSpot and Shopify. Advertisers can also opt into AI-powered text customization that can adjust existing headlines and descriptions to better match the context of a conversation.

Perhaps the most interesting experiment is Sponsored Agents.

Sponsored Agents are currently in a limited alpha with selected advertisers rather than being a generally available self-service product. But they provide a glimpse of what AI advertising could eventually become.

Instead of clicking an advertisement and immediately leaving ChatGPT for an advertiser’s website, a person could begin interacting with an AI agent provided by the advertiser.

Consider a university promoting an online master’s degree.

A prospective student asks: “What should I look for in an online cybersecurity master’s program if I already work full time?”

ChatGPT provides its answer. A sponsored placement from the university appears below it.

The prospective student could then interact with the university’s Sponsored Agent:

“Can I finish your program in two years?”

“How many classes would I need to take each semester?”

“Does my employer’s tuition reimbursement program work with your school?”

At that point, the advertisement starts looking less like an ad and more like a conversation with an admissions representative.

That may ultimately prove to be one of the defining characteristics of AI advertising: the advertisement itself can become interactive.

Grok: X Ads Are Available, but That’s Not the Same as Grok Ads

Grok presents a more complicated picture because of its close connection to X.

X already has an established advertising business. Marketers can buy promoted posts, video ads and other placements, use audience and keyword targeting, and manage campaigns through X Ads Manager. Grok and other AI technology are also increasingly being incorporated into X’s broader advertising infrastructure.

But marketers should not confuse advertising on X with advertising inside Grok.

Plans to introduce advertisements into Grok responses have been publicly discussed, including the possibility of paid placement associated with Grok suggestions.

However, as of September 2026, we could not verify a generally available self-service product comparable to ChatGPT Ads Manager that allows a marketer to purchase placement directly within Grok responses.

That distinction is important when building a media plan.

A marketer can say today: “We’re launching an X advertising campaign.”

It would be premature to treat “We’re launching a Grok advertising campaign.” as an equivalent generally available media buy.

Grok advertising is therefore something marketers should continue watching, particularly because X already possesses the advertising infrastructure necessary to turn the idea into a substantial product.

But announced intentions and current advertising inventory aren’t the same thing.

Perplexity: An Early Advertising Experiment That Went the Other Direction

Perplexity provides an especially interesting example because it was an early experimenter with AI advertising.

Beginning in 2024, Perplexity tested formats including sponsored follow-up questions and paid media positioned alongside answers.

The sponsored-question concept was particularly interesting.

Imagine someone asking Perplexity: “What should I consider when choosing running shoes for my first marathon?”

After receiving an AI-generated answer, the user might encounter a sponsored follow-up question associated with an athletic brand. Clicking it would initiate another AI response rather than simply sending the user directly to a conventional advertisement.

Early advertising participants included companies such as Indeed and Whole Foods Market, along with advertising agencies Universal McCann and PMG.

The model suggested an intriguing possibility: rather than sponsoring the answer, an advertiser could effectively sponsor the next question.

But Perplexity ultimately moved in the opposite direction from OpenAI.

In February 2026, the company confirmed that it was retreating from advertising and placing greater emphasis on subscriptions and other revenue sources.

That history is worth noting because Perplexity’s original advertising announcement remains available online. A marketer researching “Perplexity advertising” can therefore still encounter descriptions of its sponsored-question experiment and reasonably conclude that it remains a current advertising product.

It should instead be understood as an experiment Perplexity tried and subsequently moved away from.

As of this writing, marketers should not treat Perplexity as an available native paid-media channel. That doesn’t mean Perplexity is irrelevant to marketing. Businesses still have an incentive to make their websites, content and brands authoritative and understandable enough to be discovered and cited by AI systems.

But that is primarily an AEO and organic visibility opportunity, rather than a paid advertising opportunity.

Anthropic: Claude Is Deliberately Ad-Free

Anthropic has taken the clearest position of the four companies. In February 2026, Anthropic announced that Claude would remain ad-free.

The company said users would not encounter sponsored links adjacent to Claude conversations or advertiser-driven product placements inserted into responses.

So imagine someone asking Claude: “What accounting software should I consider for a 20-person nonprofit?”

An accounting software company cannot currently pay Anthropic to have its product appear underneath the answer or to have Claude recommend it.

For marketers, there simply isn’t a Claude Ads campaign to buy.

Anthropic’s decision also highlights one of the central questions facing the AI industry:

Can advertising and an AI assistant’s perceived independence comfortably coexist?

OpenAI believes advertising can coexist with trusted answers if advertisements are clearly separated from those answers.

Anthropic has chosen not to introduce that commercial relationship into Claude.

Perplexity experimented with advertising before retreating from it.

And Grok’s approach is still developing.

There is clearly no industry-wide consensus yet.

Where Can Marketers Actually Advertise Today?

As of October 2026, the landscape looks like this:

For marketers eager to test AI-native paid media today, ChatGPT is therefore the clearest opportunity among these four platforms.

But that is only part of the story.

The Bigger Change: From Keywords to Intent

The most important development may not be where an advertisement appears. It may be what the AI system understands about the person seeing it.

Consider the difference between a traditional Google search: “best CRM software” and an AI conversation: “We’re a 40-person association with about 12,000 members. Our website is WordPress, we use Mailchimp for email and our staff spends hours manually moving membership information between systems. We’re thinking about replacing our CRM. What should we be looking for?”

Both people may be interested in CRM software. But the second conversation contains much richer context.

The AI system potentially understands the organization’s size, industry, existing technology, operational problem and purchasing intent.

That creates the possibility of moving beyond keyword advertising toward intent advertising.

Instead of asking only: What phrase did this person type? An AI advertising system can potentially understand: What is this person actually trying to accomplish?

For advertisers—particularly B2B companies selling complicated products and services—that could become extremely valuable.

Paid AI Advertising and AEO Are Not the Same Thing

There is another distinction marketers need to understand.

Advertising in an AI platform and appearing organically in an AI answer are two different objectives.

Suppose someone asks: “Which agencies specialize in redesigning association websites?”

A digital agency potentially has two opportunities.

The first is earned visibility. The agency creates useful content, develops authority, earns credible mentions, structures its website effectively and makes its expertise understandable enough that an AI system might independently identify or cite it.

That is the territory of SEO, digital PR and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).

The second is paid visibility. On an AI platform offering advertising, the agency may be able to purchase an eligible sponsored placement associated with a relevant conversation.

The important point is that the second doesn’t purchase the first.

An organization buying ChatGPT Ads isn’t purchasing favorable treatment from ChatGPT. OpenAI explicitly separates advertisements from ChatGPT’s answers.

That means organizations interested in AI visibility increasingly need to think about both sides of the equation:

Can we earn our way into the answer?

and

Can we advertise alongside the conversation?

Should Marketers Be Testing AI Advertising Now?

For most organizations, AI advertising probably belongs in the testing budget rather than at the center of the media plan.

A business already investing in paid search or paid social could allocate a controlled portion of its budget to ChatGPT Ads and compare traffic quality, engagement, conversion rates and cost per acquisition.

The key word is controlled.

Don’t move a substantial portion of a successful Google Ads budget into AI advertising simply because the channel is new. Establish a hypothesis, define the audience and conversion you’re pursuing, create an appropriate landing experience and determine beforehand what results would justify expanding the test.

Grok is worth monitoring, especially for organizations already advertising on X, but marketers should continue distinguishing current X advertising capabilities from future advertising directly within Grok.

Perplexity is a reminder that not every AI company will inevitably become an advertising platform.

And Claude demonstrates that some AI companies may deliberately reject advertising altogether.

AI Advertising Is More Than Another Place to Put an Ad

It would be easy to think of AI advertising as simply another digital media placement. That may underestimate what is happening.

Search advertising monetized the keyword. Social advertising monetized the audience, interests and social graph. AI advertising has the potential to monetize the conversation and the intent contained within it.

A prospective customer may spend several minutes explaining a problem to an AI assistant before reaching the point where a product or service becomes relevant. That creates a very different environment from displaying an advertisement beside a three-word search query.

The platforms are still deciding how far they want to take that opportunity. Some are embracing advertising. Others are rejecting it. Still others are experimenting with different approaches.

For marketers in 2026, the strategy shouldn’t simply be “buy ads on AI.”

It should be to understand where paid opportunities actually exist, where they are still only planned or experimental, and where organic AI visibility is the only available route.

Organizations that learn that distinction early will be in a much better position to determine where AI belongs in their paid media and broader digital marketing strategy.

If you need help navigating this new world of AI advertising, contact us at New Target. We can help.