OpenAI launches pay-per-click ads inside ChatGPT, entering digital advertising and challenging Google and Meta for ad spend in AI-driven search

Sub economy caps out well below the hundreds of billions in ad TAM that Google and Meta split — OpenAI's valuation math only works if they get a slice of that. Publishers whose content trained GPT now watch their articles summarized into ad-supported answers with zero referral traffic; x402 micropayments for AI citations are the crypto-native counter but adoption is quarters out. Agentic answers kill the "browse 10 blue links" pattern AdWords depends on, which caps CTRs structurally below Google's.

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More coverage

• OpenAI turns on cost-per-click ads inside ChatGPT - Digiday (digiday.com)
• OpenAI adds pay-per-click pricing to ChatGPT ads (x.com)
• New ways to buy ChatGPT ads - OpenAI (openai.com)
• ChatGPT Just Turned On Cost-Per-Click Ads - Arcalea (arcalea.com)
• Ads in ChatGPT - OpenAI Help Center (help.openai.com)

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