ChatGPT Ads Are Coming in 2026: Why the Real Story Is the Data OpenAI Will Have to Share

OpenAI announced last week that ads are coming to ChatGPT. Free users and ChatGPT Go subscribers in the US will start seeing sponsored content at the bottom of responses in the coming weeks. Plus, Pro, and Enterprise users won’t see ads.

The reaction was predictable. Privacy concerns. Worries about trust erosion. Debates about whether AI responses will be influenced by advertisers (OpenAI says no). Some people called it inevitable given OpenAI’s infrastructure spending commitments. Others called it a betrayal of the technology’s promise.

But everyone’s focused on the wrong thing.

The story isn’t the ads themselves. It’s what OpenAI will have to provide to advertisers to make those ads work. And what that data will eventually reveal about how people actually use ChatGPT.

How Google Ads Changed SEO by Opening Up Search Data to Everyone

When Google launched AdWords in 2000, the conversation was about a new digital frontier. It was about novelty, a revolutionary way for businesses to reach customers and audiences who were actively searching. The focus was on connecting searcher intent directly to commerce, a fundamental shift in how businesses approached digital marketing.

What happened next was more important: Google had to give advertisers data to make the system work.

Advertisers needed to know which keywords to bid on. How much those keywords cost. How often people searched for them. What related terms existed. Whether search volume was growing or declining.

So Google built Keyword Planner. Initially just a tool for advertisers to plan campaigns. But it became the primary source of search behavior data for an entire industry.

SEOs who never spent a dollar on Google Ads used Keyword Planner to understand search volume, seasonality, trending queries, and geographic patterns. The tool revealed not just what people searched for, but when, where, and how search interest changed over time.

Google didn’t build Keyword Planner out of generosity. They built it because advertisers can’t buy ads effectively without understanding what people are searching for and how competitive those queries are.

The same dynamic is about to play out with ChatGPT.

ChatGPT’s Scale: 800 Million Weekly Users Making It the Fourth Most Visited Website

ChatGPT now has 800 million weekly active users. That’s up from 400 million in February 2025. The platform processes over 2.5 billion prompts daily. Monthly visits hit 5.8 billion in September 2025.

To put that in perspective, ChatGPT is the fourth most visited website globally. It doubled its user base in less than a year.

For context, Google Ads generated around $296 billion in revenue for 2025.. That’s the scale of what advertising platforms can become.

Why OpenAI Needs Ads: $14 Billion in Projected Losses Despite $20 Billion Revenue

OpenAI’s revenue hit $20 billion annualized in 2025, up from $6 billion in 2024. Impressive growth. But the costs are staggering.

They’re burning $8 billion annually on compute costs alone. They’re projected to lose $14 billion in 2026. They’ve committed over $1.4 trillion in infrastructure deals to Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, and others.

The math doesn’t work without ads. Subscription revenue has a ceiling. Only about 5% of ChatGPT’s user base pays for Plus or Pro subscriptions. Enterprise deals are growing but can’t cover the burn rate. Ads are the only lever that scales with 800 million weekly users.

What Advertisers Need: The Data OpenAI Will Have to Provide

For ChatGPT ads to work, advertisers will demand data  from which prompts trigger relevant ad placements, how often those prompts occur, what time of day or day of week they happen, geographic patterns, seasonal trends, cost per placement, and competitive intensity for specific query types

But What if OpenAI is only required to give data away when an event or transaction occurs? An ‘event’ could be a click on a sponsored link, an addition to a shopping cart, or a conversion on an advertiser’s site all actions that stem directly from a ChatGPT response.

From an advertiser’s perspective, one conversion event is worth a million data points about generic query volume. That single transaction ties the query, the ad placement, and the final business outcome together, creating the most insightful path forward for digital marketers. Instead of building a massive, complex keyword planner based on every prompt, OpenAI could initially focus on providing deeply granular, high-value data on post-click activity. This approach (transactional data transparency versus query volume transparency) could minimize privacy concerns while still providing a highly effective monetization lever that directly links ChatGPT’s influence to advertiser ROI.

OpenAI can’t just say “give us money and we’ll show your ad sometimes.” Business need proof! 

This means OpenAI will have to build tools that expose patterns in ChatGPT usage. Not individual conversations, but real insights about what types of conversations are happening, how often, and in what contexts.

The Data Gap: What We Don’t Know About ChatGPT Usage Right Now

Right now, we have almost no visibility into how people actually use ChatGPT at scale. We know the user numbers. We know it processes 2.5 billion messages daily.

But we don’t know what queries are most common, which product categories get researched most often, how buying-intent queries are phrased, whether certain types of questions are growing or declining, geographic differences in usage patterns, or seasonal trends in information-seeking behavior.

This is a massive blind spot for anyone trying to optimize for AI discovery. Once OpenAI launches ads, that data becomes valuable to advertisers. And to make ads sellable, OpenAI will have to surface it.

What to Expect from OpenAI’s Advertiser Tools

OpenAI hasn’t announced what their advertiser tools will look like. But based on how every other ad platform has evolved, expect

• Query category targeting interface
• Performance forecasting and planning tools
• Campaign reporting and analytics dashboards
• Competitive benchmarking

Advertisers will need to choose what types of prompts trigger their ads. That interface will reveal how OpenAI categorizes and segments ChatGPT usage.

Performance forecasting requires historical data, which means volume data becomes visible. Campaign reporting reveals conversion patterns and which types of prompts lead to actual purchases versus research.

Each of these tools exposes data that doesn’t exist publicly today.

The Bigger Picture: Data Access Matters More Than Ads

The conversation about ChatGPT ads has focused on user experience, trust, and whether sponsored content will corrupt AI responses. Those are legitimate concerns.

But the larger impact will be data access. Just like Google Ads opened up search behavior data that transformed an industry, ChatGPT ads will open up conversational AI usage data that doesn’t exist anywhere else.

The ads are OpenAI’s monetization strategy. The data is everyone else’s visibility into how 800 million people actually use AI assistants to make decisions, research products, and solve problems.

That’s the story. Not the sponsored placements at the bottom of responses. The window into user behavior that OpenAI will have to create to make those placements sellable.

Google didn’t set out to build the SEO industry’s primary research tool when they launched AdWords. But Keyword Planner became exactly that because advertising requires data transparency.

ChatGPT’s ad platform will follow the same path. And when it does, we’ll finally have real data about how AI-influenced search actually works.