A massive shift is quietly taking place in the search marketing landscape. For decades, search engine marketing (SEM) was synonymous with Google and Bing. If you wanted to capture high-intent users, you set up keyword campaigns, optimized your bidding strategies, and monitored the competition using tools like Auction Insights.
Today, the interface of search is fundamentally changing. Users are increasingly turning to AI-native platforms like ChatGPT to get direct answers, plan travel, compare products, and solve complex problems. Recognizing this behavioral shift, OpenAI launched advertising inside AI-generated responses earlier this year. Brands moved fast, utilizing a newly launched Ads Manager, lower minimum spends, and the opportunity to capture high-intent users at the exact moment of decision-making.
But this new frontier comes with a major challenge: a complete lack of competitive visibility. While your competitors are actively running ads on ChatGPT, you cannot see them. You do not know which prompts they are bidding on, what creative variations they are using, or how their presence compares to yours. Unlike traditional search, there is currently no native way to pull back this curtain. It is a blind spot that is far larger than most digital marketing teams realize.
To understand the dynamics of this new ad channel, Adthena analyzed nearly 1 million query indexes across 20 industries and five global markets (the U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada) between March 2026 and May 2026. Here is what the data reveals about how your competitors are navigating ChatGPT Ads, and what you need to do to stay ahead.
What ChatGPT Ads Look Like Right Now
To understand how to build a successful advertising strategy on ChatGPT, you must first understand how the platform serves sponsored content. It is not a mirror image of Google’s search engine results page (SERP). The environment is more conversational, highly contextual, and far more restrictive in terms of real estate.
Adthena’s data from the spring of 2026 shows a clear picture of an emerging advertising channel that is highly concentrated, selective, and running at different speeds depending on the geographic market.
A U.S.-First Channel with Global Markets Warming Up
The roll-out of ChatGPT Ads has not been uniform across the globe. Currently, it is overwhelmingly a U.S.-first advertising channel, while other major markets are still in their foundational stages.
In the United States, ChatGPT served ads on approximately 4.5% of all queries analyzed. Canada and New Zealand are also showing active ad participation, with Canada slightly leading at 4.57% and New Zealand sitting at 3.85%. Australia follows at a more modest 1.61% ad frequency.
The most striking finding, however, comes from the United Kingdom. Across roughly 170,000 U.K. query indexes monitored during the same March to May 2026 period, Adthena detected zero ads. The U.S. currently accounts for approximately 90% of all ChatGPT ad placements in our dataset.
For U.K.-based search teams, this is a double-edged sword. On one hand, the channel is not live in your market yet, meaning there is no immediate pressure to divert budget today. On the other hand, your U.S. competitors are spending months testing prompts, refining creative assets, and understanding user behavior. When OpenAI opens the advertising gates in the U.K., those international competitors will enter the market with a mature, data-driven strategy. U.K. brands that wait until launch day to start thinking about AI search will be starting from scratch.
The Binary Reality of ChatGPT Ad Real Estate
One of the most critical structural differences between ChatGPT and traditional search engines is the volume of available ad slots. On a Google search page, a user might see three to four sponsored links at the top, local map ads, shopping carousels, and organic results. A business can hold position two or three, maintain a healthy click-through rate, and drive consistent conversions.
On ChatGPT, the inventory is incredibly scarce. In the U.S., ChatGPT averages just 1.06 ad items per ad-bearing response. This means that in the vast majority of cases where an ad is present, there is only a single sponsored slot available. There are no carousels, no sidebars, and no secondary listings.
This reality completely changes the stakes for search marketers. Share of voice on ChatGPT is binary: you are either featured in the answer, or you do not exist. There is no middle ground, and there is no consolidation prize for second place. This winner-take-all environment demands absolute precision in how you target prompts and structure your bids.
Industries Leading the Charge vs. Restricted Categories
Not all business categories are treated equally on ChatGPT. The data reveals that while some industries are aggressively building a presence on the platform, others are completely locked out—either due to strict policy guidelines or structural limitations in how OpenAI manages sensitive topics.
The Blocked Verticals
During our three-month analysis, four major industries returned exactly zero ads across the entire international dataset:
- Legal
- Pharma
- Banking
- Nonprofit
Additionally, the Healthcare category was near-zero, registering an ad frequency of just 0.45%. This absence of commercial activity is almost certainly the result of deliberate policy decisions by OpenAI to restrict advertising on queries related to sensitive financial, legal, and medical decisions.
However, these restrictions are unlikely to remain permanent. As AI compliance standards mature and OpenAI refines its moderation capabilities, these barriers will shift. Marketers in these sectors must continue to monitor the landscape so they can react immediately when these high-value categories begin to open up.
The Top Industries Driving Ad Frequency
Outside of the blocked categories, some of the most active industries on ChatGPT are not necessarily the ones marketers would expect.
Logistics tops the list with an impressive 12.4% ad frequency. This is closely followed by Home & Garden at 12% and Beauty & Cosmetics at 10.03%. These three sectors are indexing well above the overall platform average of approximately 3.3%.
Other highly active categories include:
- Media & Entertainment (8%)
- Insurance (7.2%)
- Energy & Utilities (6.4%)
These early-adopting categories suggest that advertisers are finding success in conversational contexts where users are looking for recommendations, comparing services, or looking for immediate logistical solutions.
Retail is Where the Real Capital is Concentrating
While Logistics and Home & Garden lead in terms of relative frequency, Retail & Fashion is where the sheer volume of search budget is flowing.
In the U.S. market, Retail & Fashion accounts for 24.1% of overall query volume, but it commands a massive 38.9% of all U.S. ad placements. This clear over-index is not a technical anomaly; it represents intense, highly active advertiser demand. With an ad frequency of 6.55% against the broader U.S. average of 4.5%, retail brands are competing aggressively for visibility in AI responses. Across Adthena’s global dataset, retail accounts for more than a third of all ad placements.
This concentration makes sense when you look at how consumers use ChatGPT. Instead of typing short keyword strings like “best running shoes,” users are entering detailed prompts like, “I need a durable pair of running shoes for trail running in wet conditions, what do you recommend?” Retailers who can place their product dynamically within that highly specific, conversational response stand to win incredibly high-intent customers.
The Competitive Intelligence Blind Spot
The rapid growth of ChatGPT as an advertising channel has created a major dilemma for modern performance marketers. In search marketing, competitive intelligence is not a luxury—it is the baseline of operational success. Professional search teams rely on historic data, competitor ad copy analysis, impression share metrics, and keyword trends to allocate budgets effectively and justify their return on ad spend (ROAS).
Currently, OpenAI’s native Ads Manager does not provide these tools. Inside the native interface, you can see your own metrics:
- Total spend
- Impressions
- Clicks
- Average Cost Per Click (CPC)
- Click-Through Rate (CTR)
What you cannot see is anything happening outside of your own account. You have no way of knowing which competitors are bidding on the exact same prompts, how your share of voice fluctuates throughout the week, what creative strategies your rivals are using to capture the single available ad slot, or what new prompts are gaining traction in your category.
Running paid acquisition campaigns in a format with only one winner per response—without knowing who you are competing against—is a recipe for inefficient spending. You are essentially bidding in the dark.
Bringing Visibility to AI Search: ChatGPT Ads Intelligence
To eliminate this blind spot, Adthena developed a specialized solution designed to bring transparency to AI search engine marketing: ChatGPT Ads Intelligence.
By monitoring over 300,000 prompts daily across live markets, the platform provides the comprehensive, whole-market view that has been missing from this channel. This tool brings the same robust competitive intelligence approach that search teams rely on for Google paid search and applies it directly to the unique environment of ChatGPT.
With this level of visibility, brands can:
- Identify which competitors are bidding on core brand, generic, and transactional prompts.
- Track share of voice trends week-over-week to measure competitive pressure.
- Analyze competitor ad creative to refine their own conversational ad copy.
- Discover “greenfield” prompts—high-intent, highly relevant queries where no other advertisers are currently showing up.
Finding those greenfield opportunities is especially valuable right now. Because ChatGPT Ads is a relatively young channel, many highly lucrative conversational search terms have low or non-existent competition. Identifying and bidding on these prompts early allows brands to establish a highly cost-effective presence before the market becomes saturated.
To see how your brand stacks up against the competition in this new space, you can try ChatGPT Ads Intelligence free for 21 days and gain immediate access to prompt-level ad detection and competitive data.
The Strategic Imperative Beyond ChatGPT
It is important to look at ChatGPT Ads not as an isolated experiment, but as the beginning of a fundamental re-platforming of digital search.
Consumer behavior has fractured. Users are no longer relying solely on standard web search to find information. They are utilizing a variety of conversational platforms, including ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini, to assist with their research and purchasing journeys. The high-intent search queries that used to begin and end on a search engine results page are now distributed across multiple AI-native ecosystems.
For search engine marketers, the scope of responsibilities is expanding. To maintain market share, the same rigor, testing, and competitive analysis that has historically been applied to Google Ads must now be applied to conversational AI interfaces.
The brands that invest the time and budget to understand ChatGPT’s ad dynamics today will be incredibly difficult to displace as the platform matures. This dynamic mirrors the early days of Google AdWords; the marketers who mastered that system before it became crowded built a foundation of search equity and data advantages that took competitors years to close. That exact same opportunity is available right now.
Are you ready to see who is bidding on your terms and how to win the conversational search space? Start your free 21-day trial of Adthena’s ChatGPT Ads Intelligence today.