ChatGPT test ads can invite users to chat with brands like Wayfair

An ad on ChatGPT carried a call to action that invited users to chat with Wayfair, Ad Age's Garett Sloane reported on Sept. 14. Ad Age describes it as one of OpenAI's first truly conversational ads, a format that invites consumers to click into chats with brands and turns a sponsored line under an answer into a second conversation, this one with the brand.

Ad Age calls these OpenAI's first truly conversational ads. Wayfair is among the first advertisers Ad Age has spotted using what it describes as a new business chat format.

That is a different product from the one OpenAI announced in January. Back then, Variety's Todd Spangler reported, the test placed a relevant sponsored product or service at the bottom of an answer, clearly labeled and separated from the organic reply. A conversational ad asks more of the advertiser. If the call to action is a chat, something on the brand's side has to answer.

A label under the answer becomes a doorway

The ground rules OpenAI set in January still frame the product. Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of applications, wrote in the company's announcement that ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives, that users can dismiss any ad and switch off personalization, and that user data and conversations are never sold to advertisers, according to Variety. Accounts belonging to users under 18, or estimated to be minors, get no ads during the test, and ads stay away from health, mental health and politics.

What the Wayfair sighting adds is the shape of the click. In the format Ad Age describes, the ad invites the consumer to click into a chat with the brand, so the sponsored message is the start of a brand conversation rather than a one-line pitch.

For a head of ecommerce at a home goods or apparel retailer, that is the operational line to notice. A display buy needs creative and a landing page. A chat buy, if it works the way the Wayfair ad implies, needs an answer for every question a shopper might ask about a sofa's dimensions, shipping window or return policy, at whatever hour ChatGPT users happen to be awake. None of the reporting describes how Wayfair staffs or automates its end of the chat, so that belongs on the list of questions for a sales rep rather than in the assumptions column.

Impressions and clicks come back; the conversation stays put

The data flow is the part a CIO or privacy lead will want in writing. OpenAI has said advertisers will not gain access to users' conversations, chat history, memories or personal details, according to Inc.'s Moses Jeanfrancois, reporting on the August launch in India. Instead they receive aggregated campaign data such as impressions and clicks, and users control ad personalization and can clear the data used for advertising.

Set that beside the way the ad industry has described the opportunity. In a February AdExchanger column, EX.CO's Shachar Orren argued that ChatGPT changes targeting because intent is expressed in the prompt rather than inferred from cookies and cohorts; a person asking about dishwashers may reveal, across a sequence of interactions, that they are moving homes, managing a budget or prioritizing sustainability, according to AdExchanger. That richness sits inside OpenAI's matching engine. What crosses to the advertiser is a count.

The gap matters for measurement. Conversion tracking has been added since the February test began, according to MarketingTech, so a retailer can tie a ChatGPT click to a sale on its own site. What it cannot do, on the evidence in these reports, is see which conversational cue triggered the ad or audit why a given shopper saw it. Teams that build attribution models on keyword-level search data will be working with less granularity here.

Seven countries, 50 brands in India and a tool set still filling out

The rollout has moved quickly for a product that did not exist in January. OpenAI started testing ads in February. Since then, according to a July report from MarketingTech's Muhammad Zulhusni, the company has layered on location targeting, conversion tracking, cost-per-click bidding and self-service campaign management. An OpenAI spokesperson told Business Insider that ads were live in seven countries at the time of that report.

India came next. OpenAI said it would start showing ads on ChatGPT's free and Go tiers there for 50 brands, working through agencies including WPP and Omnicom, according to TechCrunch reporting relayed by Inc. on Aug. 27. OpenAI has said it has more than 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users in India, many on the free or Go tiers, and plans new offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru later this year alongside its existing New Delhi presence, per Inc.

Dave Dugan, OpenAI's head of global ads solutions, said in the India announcement that the format lets businesses of every size introduce themselves at high-context moments when decisions are starting to take shape, per TechCrunch via Inc. He has also said the company deliberately restricted inventory during the early rollout to protect the user experience, MarketingTech reported. During the early pilots, major advertisers put hundreds of thousands of dollars into their campaigns.

Marketers using the platform say its campaign controls remain limited compared with those available from Google and Meta, according to MarketingTech, which is roughly what a buyer should expect from an ad platform a few months into a public test. Location targeting and CPC bidding exist. The deeper audience and creative tooling a performance team uses daily is, on this reporting, still arriving.

A $2.4 billion plan against a sub-$1 billion market forecast

The revenue targets explain the pace. OpenAI's ad business had reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue by March, Business Insider reported, per MarketingTech. The company has projected about $2.4 billion in ad revenue for 2026 and roughly $100 billion by 2030, according to earlier reporting by The Information and Axios cited in the same piece.

EMARKETER expects US chatbot advertising revenue to stay below $1 billion in 2026, MarketingTech noted, and its analyst Nate Elliott told Business Insider that hitting OpenAI's figure would require aggressive pricing, a heavy volume of ads, stronger consumer adoption and a far bigger user base. ChatGPT already has about one billion monthly users, per MarketingTech, so the audience exists. The ad load, by Dugan's own account, is being held back on purpose.

For a buyer, the practical reading is that inventory is scarce by design and pricing is being set in a market with very little public benchmark data. A retailer that wants a reference point before committing a test budget will find few. The pilot commitments MarketingTech describes, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, are the closest thing to one in the public record.

Who sees these ads at work

One detail matters to every IT leader whose staff use ChatGPT on a company plan. When OpenAI announced the test in January it said ads would run only on the free tier and on ChatGPT Go, the $8-a-month entry tier launched the same day, according to Variety. Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise subscriptions were excluded.

• Ad-supported during the test: Free and ChatGPT Go ($8 a month), per Variety
• Ad-free: Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise, per Variety

That split, if it holds, means a Wayfair chat prompt is something an employee sees on a personal free account, not inside a licensed enterprise workspace. It also means the conversational format lives, for now, among the users OpenAI says are most numerous: the free and Go tiers that make up much of its 100 million-plus weekly users in India.

The next signal to watch is whether other retailers' names start appearing beside Wayfair's in the chat format, and whether the inventory Dugan has held back begins to open. Both would show up first where OpenAI said in January the ads would sit: at the bottom of an answer, clearly labeled and separated from the organic response, according to Variety.