ChatGPT Ads Hit $1 Billion Run Rate but Half of Brands Lose Money

OpenAI has signed up more than 100,000 advertisers for ChatGPT Ads and scaled the nine-month-old platform to a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate — yet new data shows 52% of enterprise advertisers struggle to recoup their spend on it.

The figure comes from search intelligence platform Adthena, which reviewed ChatGPT ad-performance results from 30 enterprise brands between July and September. Only 26% matched or beat comparable Google ads. The remainder reported mixed results.

Independent research sharpens the gap. A working paper under review by e-commerce researchers Maximilian Kaiser and Christian Schulze found that across 102 advertiser sites, ChatGPT Ads generated $0.89 in revenue per US session, compared with $2.45 for Google search ads — roughly 36 cents on the dollar. "What makes us cautious about 'it will come with time' is the size of the gap," Kaiser and Schulze said over email.

The takeaway in plain words: ChatGPT Ads, launched about nine months ago, has scale but not yet proven returns.

What are major CMOs actually seeing?

The verdict from brand leaders is, so far, mixed. "We've dabbled in it," Twilio CMO Chris Koehler said. Intuit is "experimenting," per its CMO Thomas Ranese.

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

Not every data point is negative. OpenAI published a case study in October from the note-taking app Evernote, which found that ChatGPT Ads delivered a trial-to-paid conversion rate about 10% to 20% above the company's historical average across its paid-acquisition channels earlier that year. One strong case study, however, does not offset a dataset of 30 brands with a majority losing money.

Why can't OpenAI just grow its way out?

Growth of the ad business is constrained on three fronts, according to the reporting: the size of ChatGPT's free user base, the scarcity of ad-relevant conversations, and the tight ceiling on how many ads users will tolerate before abandoning the product.

OpenAI's head of global ad solutions, Dave Dugan, 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 show up at scale.

Kaiser and Schulze suggest one fix: move ads from cards alongside conversations into the answers themselves. That appears unlikely. OpenAI's published ad principles state that ads won't influence the answers ChatGPT gives and that the company prioritizes user experience over revenue — a constraint that caps how aggressively the platform can monetize attention.

The takeaway: OpenAI's own rules limit the most obvious performance lever.

Is measurement getting better?

Adthena CMO Ashley Fletcher calls measurement a "sore point" for marketers on ChatGPT. OpenAI has introduced a new measurement pixel and conversion bidding, letting advertisers set a target cost per acquisition or cost per click. Fletcher said those tools will give CMOs better numbers to model next steps — but he worries what the numbers will say.

Cleaner measurement may reveal that ChatGPT ads mostly "nudge people" at the first stage of brand consideration, Fletcher said. That is a long way from the quick conversions advertisers expect from established platforms. Fletcher flagged Black Friday as the next major test.

Who is winning on the platform?

Some marketers report early 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 more repeatable category where investment scales with performance, said Jonathan Vardi, the company's head of strategy.

Vardi's method: list the pain points each product solves, turn those into specific ads, and feed conversion data back to the platform. "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 AdRoll tags every ChatGPT ad it runs and uses that signal 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."

The pattern is consistent: advertisers who work hardest on data feedback and full-funnel integration see results; those who treat ChatGPT like a self-optimizing search channel often do not. Whether the majority of the 100,000 advertisers can make that leap — and whether Black Friday delivers clean answers — will decide if OpenAI's ad business moves from experiment to line item.