ChatGPT Ads Explained
Search created a new advertising category two decades ago. Social created another one after that. ChatGPT is now doing the same thing and the businesses that understand how the format actually works, before it becomes commoditised, will be the ones capturing demand at the lowest cost.
Bullshark is the first marketing growth agency in Malta to extend its operations to ChatGPT Ads, adding the channel to a performance infrastructure that already runs across Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads and more.
Here’s what the channel actually is, how it works, and why it matters at board level, not just to a media buying team.
What Advertising in ChatGPT Actually Is
OpenAI is testing ads inside ChatGPT for users on the Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu accounts do not see ads at all, which matters commercially, because it means the ad-eligible audience is specifically the free-tier and lower subscription user base, not the full ChatGPT user pool.
Ads appear below the end of a ChatGPT response, clearly labelled as sponsored and visually separated from the model’s answer. They are not shown in sensitive or regulated conversations; personal health, mental health, and political topics are excluded entirely, and they never appear in Temporary Chats or for accounts identified as belonging to users under 18.
Critically, ads do not influence what ChatGPT says. Ads run on a separate system from the underlying model, and advertisers have no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT’s responses. That separation is core to how OpenAI is positioning trust in the ad format, and it’s also why the ad unit itself must earn relevance on its own, without any assist from the conversation’s actual answer.
How Ad Selection and Targeting Work
This is where ChatGPT Ads differ structurally from search or social advertising.
Ad delivery is based on the context and intent of the user’s current conversation, the advertiser’s landing page, ad title and copy, and any targeting selections or context hints the advertiser provides. Where a user has ads personalisation enabled, OpenAI may also draw on select signals from that person’s broader ChatGPT experience; past chats, memory, and how they’ve previously interacted with ads, to refine relevance.
When multiple ads are eligible for the same conversation, ranking considers both relevance and advertiser bid, a familiar auction dynamic, but running against conversational intent rather than a search query or a social feed scroll.
Privacy is built into the model at a structural level. Advertisers never receive a user’s actual chats, chat history, memories, name, email, precise location, IP address, or sensitive information. They receive aggregated performance data only; views and clicks, not the underlying conversation that triggered the ad.
Why This Matters for Advertisers
The commercial opportunity here is not “another placement to buy.” It’s a shift in where purchase-intent conversations are actually happening.
A user asking ChatGPT for a product recommendation, a service comparison, or advice on solving a specific problem is expressing intent more directly than a search query or a scroll-stopping social post. That’s a materially different signal than most paid channels are built to capture, and right now, most advertisers don’t have the infrastructure, creative approach, or targeting discipline to act on it.
That gap is exactly where early movers create an advantage. As with every new ad channel, cost-per-result tends to be lowest before the category matures, and competition drives bidding up. Businesses that build the operational discipline now; proper creative for the format, landing pages built for conversational referral traffic, and reporting that connects this new channel to CRM and revenue data will be positioned ahead of competitors who wait for the channel to become mainstream.
Why Bullshark Is First on This in Malta
Bullshark has built its performance marketing infrastructure around one principle: media spend should connect to revenue, not sit in a channel-level report disconnected from what actually happens after the click.
That infrastructure; audience strategy, creative testing frameworks, conversion tracking, CRM integration, and revenue reporting are not being rebuilt for ChatGPT Ads. It’s being extended to it. Bullshark has already applied this model to deliver 26.3X ROAS through search-led acquisition and 23X peak ROAS through international performance media, and the same operating discipline now governs how campaigns are structured, tested, and measured on ChatGPT.
As the first marketing growth agency in Malta running campaigns on this channel, Bullshark is positioned to help Maltese and international businesses move early while the cost of being early still exists as an advantage.
What Businesses Should Ask Before Moving Into ChatGPT Ads
Before allocating budget to any new channel, three questions determine whether it will perform:
- Does the creative and landing page experience match how someone arrives after reading a conversational recommendation, not a search result?
- Is performance being tracked back to revenue and CRM data, or measured clicks and impressions alone?
- Is there a structured testing process in place, or is this a one-off experiment with no system behind it?
If the answer to any of these is uncertain, the channel will underperform regardless of how early the business gets in; the advantage comes from the infrastructure, not just the access.
The System Behind Being First
Being first on a channel is only valuable if the operating model behind it can actually convert attention into revenue. That’s the difference between running ads on ChatGPT and building ChatGPT into a performance system.
Bullshark has done the latter; extending proven acquisition infrastructure to the newest channel in market, rather than treating it as a standalone experiment.
Start a Conversation with Bullshark about running ChatGPT Ads as part of a connected performance marketing system.
