ChatGPT started testing advertising on February 9, 2026, and now has more than 100,000 advertisers.
Ads are only visible to users of the free version and Go subscribers. They are clearly marked and placed in a separate area below the dialog box and are not inserted into the answers. OpenAI’s statement at the time was that advertising does not touch private conversations, and advertisers cannot influence the answers. Altman also gave an expectation: in the long run, advertising revenue will account for less than half of total revenue.
Less than half, it sounds like he is trying to comfort him, but from another perspective, it means he is already carrying half of the country.
Google is not slow to act either. Last week, it expanded advertising in search AI Mode to 10 countries outside the United States.
The only one of the three that remains untouched is Anthropic. Claude has not invested in advertising so far, and the IPO documents submitted did not even mention advertising as a way to generate revenue. This is a deliberately blank space in its business story. The selling point is that there is no advertising interference.
Advertising startups have also emerged in this industry. Koah advertises more than 200 AI applications and has only one-tenth the number of customers as OpenAI. The data it gives is that the click-through rate of ads involving AI has doubled, and the overall rate is around 3%.
3% is a high number in traditional display advertising. Advertisers are willing to come, probably for this reason. On the user side, the price of using AI for free is starting to become concrete.