Your buyers stopped searching and started asking.
Advertising inside AI assistants is now a real, self-serve channel with real money moving through it. It is early enough to be cheap and new enough that most agencies are still guessing. We would rather measure it.
Running paid search since before it was called PPC. Atlanta-based.
A test budget exists to produce an answer.
Not to look modern in a meeting. Here is the order we do it in.
Work out whether your buyer is even there
ChatGPT ads run on the free and Go tiers. If your buyer is an enterprise seat on a paid plan, they will never see the placement, and no amount of budget changes that. This is a five-minute question that saves a quarter of wasted spend.
- Who your buyer is, and which tier they are likely on
- Whether the purchase is researched conversationally or not
- Whether the channel can be measured before it is funded
- Buyer researches conversationallyyes
- Reachable on free / Go tiersyes
- Conversion lands in a CRMyes
- Needs keyword-level controlnot yet
- Mature benchmark data existsno
Treat it as its own auction, not Google with a new logo
Matching is contextual rather than keyword-bid, so the levers are different. Creative quality affects ranking alongside the bid, which means the thing most PPC agencies treat as decoration is doing real work here.
- Creative built for a conversation, not a results page
- CPC bidding, with budgets capped while the channel is unproven
- No copy-pasting your search ads across and calling it a launch
Keep the search account carrying the pipeline
New channels are funded out of curiosity budget, not out of the campaigns currently producing leads. We ring-fence the test, keep the reporting separate, and give you a number at the end rather than a vibe.
- Test spend reported on its own, never blended into the total
- A stated threshold for what continuing would require
- A recommendation to stop if it does not clear the threshold
qualified lead
What people ask before funding an AI ad test
Including the ones where the answer is "probably not yet".
- Is anyone actually buying on ChatGPT?
- OpenAI opened self-serve advertising in May 2026 and reported a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate within about 200 days of launch. It is early, but it is not a pilot anymore.
- Where do the ads appear?
- In clearly labeled slots attached to answers, on the free and Go tiers. Paid tiers do not carry ads. Matching is contextual rather than keyword-bid, and OpenAI does not pass conversation content or personal details to advertisers.
- Should I move budget out of Google?
- Usually not yet. Google search is still where the demand with a credit card out sits. The sensible shape is a small, ring-fenced test budget on AI placements while the search account keeps carrying the pipeline.
- How do you measure something this new?
- The same way as any other channel: a conversion is a real inquiry landing in your CRM, tagged by source. If a channel cannot be measured that way we will say so before you spend on it.
- What if it does not work?
- Then we tell you and we stop. A test budget exists to produce an answer, and "no" is a valid answer that has saved you the larger spend.
- Do you also do the AI search optimization side?
- Yes, and they are different jobs. Paid placement buys you a slot. Getting cited in the answer itself is an organic problem, and the two support each other rather than substitute.
Tell us about your campaign
What you are running now, what you have tried, and what you need it to do. The more you tell us up front, the more useful the first conversation is.