For decades, digital advertising has relied on proxies for intent: demographics, behaviors, cohorts and fragmented signals inferred from clicks and cookies.
As of this week, that model is being tested. OpenAI has begun experimenting with ads in ChatGPT, matching sponsored messages to the topics and prompts within a user’s conversation.
In a prompt-driven environment like ChatGPT, intent is no longer inferred; it is expressed. A user isn’t simply searching for the best dishwasher. They may be moving homes, managing a budget or prioritizing sustainability, all revealed across a sequence of interactions.
As ad products align with prompts rather than personas, targeting shifts from who someone is to what they are trying to accomplish in real time. Advertising moves from predicting behavior to responding to meaning.
This disruption will affect both the buy side and sell side. For brands, this opens a new lever beyond impressions. For publishers, this is a business problem, as their first-party data and on-site inventory could become less valuable for targeting.
From ads to outcomes
The real disruption won’t be in where ads appear but how they are constructed. Instead of spotlighting a single product, conversational platforms can orchestrate decisions and assemble solutions to prompts dynamically.
Imagine a user asking about flu symptoms. Rather than serving a single banner ad, the platform could surface a curated “flu kit”: cough syrup, nasal decongestants, pain relievers, tissues and thermometers, sourced from a retailer like CVS or Walgreens.
Which raises questions about attribution and control for the broader digital advertising industry. When ads are assembled by AI, who owns the customer journey – the brand, the platform or the algorithm?
The publisher reality – and a possible opening
For publishers, conversational AI is not a theoretical risk. It is already impacting their website traffic.
As AI-generated answers replace clicks, referral traffic has declined across search and discovery platforms. AI summaries from Google and others have accelerated a zero-click dynamic in which users consume information without visiting the source. The threat to the digital publishing business model is triggering lawsuits, licensing deals and urgent debates about the economics of journalism.
Conversational platforms like ChatGPT exacerbate this dynamic because they are designed to retain attention, not redirect it to third parties.
Yet advertising introduces a potential opening for publishers.
Consider someone trying to understand how rising mortgage rates affect home affordability. Today, a conversational platform might synthesize multiple publisher and brand sources into a single answer. In an ad-supported model, that same inquiry could be an opportunity for a trusted financial publisher to sponsor an explainer, interactive calculator or data-driven analysis. These tools could be surfaced as a clearly attributed layer within the conversation.
Under this model, publishers would compete less for clicks and more for relevance at the moment decisions are formed.
However, this possibility is not guaranteed. Platforms will still control distribution logic, and attribution will remain contested.
But advertising offers publishers something they have lacked in the AI era: a way to participate in monetization rather than merely supply raw material in the form of first-party data.
The user factor
The most underestimated variable in this shift is the user.
Ads embedded in conversation will feel less like interruptions and more like guidance. Relevance will increase. So will expectations.
Users will no longer judge advertising by whether it is clickable, but whether it is genuinely helpful. They will expect clarity about what is sponsored, why it appears and whose interests it serves.
Today, OpenAI says its ads will be clearly distinguishable from the conversation. But as formats evolve and become more native to the experience, the line between answers and sponsorship may blur. And when that happens, transparency stops being a compliance exercise; it becomes a trust contract.
To do their part, platforms must design experiences where commercial content enhances understanding rather than erodes credibility.
A structural reset
If search monetized curiosity and social monetized identity, conversational AI may monetize intention.
That is not an incremental change; it is a structural reset.
The industry should stop asking whether OpenAI can build an ad business. The more urgent question is whether the advertising ecosystem is prepared for a world where conversation – not clicks, feeds or queries – becomes the most valuable form of inventory.
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
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