Where do the ads appear?
Inside the conversation, alongside the assistant's response, rather than in a separate results column. There is no ten-blue-links page to be ranked on, which removes the whole idea of position as most advertisers understand it.
They are served to signed-in adult users on the free and lower-priced tiers. Higher-tier subscribers do not see advertising at all. So the audience is shaped by willingness to pay for an ad-free product, which is worth planning around rather than discovering after the fact.
How does an ad get matched to a conversation?
On the topic and intent of what is being discussed, settled through a second-price auction — meaning you generally pay less than the maximum you were willing to bid.
The important word is context. The system is not matching a phrase somebody typed; it is matching a described situation. Someone explaining that they need to hire help with advertising, in a particular city, on a particular budget, is a richer signal than the three words they would have typed into a search box.
Which is why the brief matters more than the keyword list here. You are not assembling match types. You are describing the circumstances in which your offer is the right answer, and letting the matching do the rest.
What do the ads actually look like?
Text-first, short, and shaped to sit inside a reply rather than interrupt it. That constraint is the whole creative problem: you get very little room, next to content the reader actually asked for, so anything decorative is dead weight.
The practical implication is that a clear offer beats clever writing by a wide margin. "Google and Meta ads managed for service businesses, free audit first" survives the format. A tagline does not.
What can you measure?
Impressions, clicks, spend, click-through rate, average cost per click and per thousand impressions, and conversions. Genuinely useful, and noticeably thinner than a mature platform.
So the measurement that decides your budget has to live on your side — analytics events, server-side where it matters, and lead capture that records where a lead came from. Read the platform dashboard for delivery and cost. Read your own systems for whether it worked. Businesses that skip the second half end up optimising toward cheap clicks, which is the most expensive habit in advertising.
What this means for how you run it
Three consequences follow from the mechanics.
- Creative and offer carry more weight than bid management. There is less machinery to optimise, so the message does the work.
- Conversion tracking is not optional. Thin reporting plus no tracking equals no information at any budget.
- Patience is a real input. Fewer levers means fewer things to fiddle with, and fiddling on a young account mostly resets learning.
If you would rather not learn it
We run this channel for businesses across India, and the first conversation is a straight assessment of whether it suits what you sell. Details on the ChatGPT ads service page.
Common questions
Where do ChatGPT ads appear?
Inside the conversation, alongside the assistant's reply, rather than on a separate results page. There is no ranked list of links, so position in the traditional sense does not apply.
How are ads matched to a conversation?
On the topic and intent of the discussion, settled through a second-price auction so you generally pay less than your maximum bid. You are matched to a described situation rather than to a phrase somebody typed.
What metrics does the platform report?
Impressions, clicks, spend, click-through rate, average cost per click and per thousand impressions, and conversions. Useful for delivery and cost; too thin to judge business outcomes, which is why tracking on your own site matters.