What ChatGPT Ads Look Like for Advertisers

OpenAI is running ad trials inside ChatGPT with a $200,000 minimum buy and a $60 CPM, working with Adobe, Target, Albertsons, and WPP. The format is nothing like Google search ads – there’s no auction, no self-service dashboard, and almost no performance data. Advertisers pick keywords, and the model decides when and how to surface them inside conversations. The reporting is bare: campaign name, impressions, clicks. That’s it. For brands used to granular attribution, the opacity is a real problem. OpenAI is essentially asking advertisers to trust the model as both curator and gatekeeper of commercial relevance, a proposition that works fine at $200K test budgets but gets harder to defend at scale. Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews are circling the same question from different angles.