I Asked Chat GPT 500 Questions. Here Are the Ads I Saw Most Often | WIRED

Overview

I Asked Chat GPT 500 Questions. Here Are the Ads I Saw Most Often

Open AI is starting to stuff the free version of Chat GPT with ads. So, I spent this week asking Chat GPT 500 questions on the mobile app to get a sense of how these new ads look as they roll out to more users in the US. My questions were loosely based on how Open AI says people use its generative AI tool, like for seeking information or requesting practical guidance.

Details

In my rough tests, the Chat GPT ads felt quite frequent. About one out of every five questions in a new conversation thread triggered an ad at the bottom of the chatbot’s output. These ads always included a website link as a button and were tailored to the general topic of my question. As Open AI continues to experiment with ads in Chat GPT, the formatting and the frequency of these ads may change.

“Because Chat GPT is a trusted and personal environment for many people, we’re intentionally rolling ads out slowly,” an Open AI spokesperson tells WIRED. “Starting with a limited number of advertisers and formats while we iterate based on what we learn.” Open AI claims the decision to roll out ads now is not tied to any rumored IPO later this year, but rather part of a long-term strategy to keep Chat GPT broadly accessible.

Overall, I saw ads for dog food, printers, hotel reservations, productivity software, movie tickets, food delivery apps, fashionable ties, streaming services, corporate credit cards, apartment furniture, cruise vacations, AI coding tools, freelance editors, skin-care articles, business internet plans, handmade gifts, grocery stores, and basketball tickets, among others.

Questions related to travel currently seem to trigger ads the most often. When I asked for help planning a trip to Palm Springs, the ad attached to the bottom of the answer was for Booking.com. When I clicked on the link, it automatically searched for hotel deals in Palm Springs.

Before this year’s embrace of ads for free users, Open AI CEO Sam Altman had expressed his distaste for chatbots with ads. “I hate ads,” Altman said during an onstage discussion at Harvard Business School in 2024. He said the mixture of “ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling,” and it raised questions about who may be influencing a chatbot’s answers.

“I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us for a business model,” he said. “I would do it if it meant that was the only way to get everybody in the world access to great services. But, if we can find something that doesn't do that, I'd prefer that.” I guess 2026 is the year for some last-resort moves. Open AI recently discontinued Sora, its social media app for AI videos, and scrapped plans for an erotic version of Chat GPT. Leaders at the company are attempting to streamline operations and stave off the competition by increasingly focusing on core products.

Open AI started testing ads in Chat GPT in February in the US. I first started noticing them in my tester account in early March. The company claims that ads do not impact the content of Chat GPT answers and that your full conversation is not shared with companies paying for ad placements. The ads that are served to users are influenced by the topic of your question as well as your past chats and whatever Chat GPT stores in its memory about you.

Open AI has a chance to better monetize its user base as online search habits shift and more money is poured into generative AI-focused advertising. “The billions of dollars that are currently spent on search ads are going to be channeled to this new form of ad, so it's a huge multibillion-dollar market that is emerging,” says Olivier Toubia, a marketing professor at Columbia Business School who focuses on AI.

Free users are costly for Open AI. One of its biggest challenges throughout this change will be introducing ads at scale, without deteriorating trust or pushing users to competing chatbots, like Google’s Gemini or Anthropic’s Claude.

“It's not going to be easy for Chat GPT to, let's say, erode the quality of the experience without losing a lot of users,” says Stefano Puntoni, a marketing professor at Wharton who researches generative AI. Neither of Open AI’s main competitors features sponsored ad buttons in the outputs, though Google recently said it’s not ruling it out.

Sometimes, when I asked a question with a name brand in the prompt, like Door Dash or Netflix, the ad below the answer was for one of the company’s direct competitors. Toubia describes this as “poaching” and says this technique is a longtime staple of digital advertising in search engines. “That definitely has been a key engine behind the growth of online advertising,” he says. “It seems like it's going to be the case also with [large language model] advertising.”

Right now, Open AI is hiring for multiple positions, from software engineers to marketing leaders, to work on this core integration of ads. One of the open positions on Open AI’s site is for a “product marketing lead, advertising,” and part of the role's responsibilities is to “identify product risk areas (e.g., performance, safety, policy, trust) and drive cross-functional plans to mitigate them.” Ads come with risks, and how they’re executed will shape the future of the company.

If I exclusively used the free tier of Chat GPT, the introduction of these ads would have me considering other AI tools. Even with Open AI’s explicit ad policies, there’s an aura of surveillance these ads introduce to the user experience, which is more personal with a chatbot compared to the traditional Google Search experience. While I know advertisers can’t currently influence Chat GPT’s outputs or see my chats, the incessant ads below answers made the conversations seem less private, and I felt hyperaware of the personal data I was sharing with this bot.

After this limited rollout in the US, Open AI will move to the next phase. “We’re seeing no impact on consumer trust metrics, low dismissal rates of ads, and ongoing improvements in the relevance of ads as we learn from feedback. These positive signals support moving into the next phase of our pilot,” reads an update on Open AI’s website dated March 26. The company is expected to expand this ad push to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Everything is on the line for Open AI as this ad rollout spreads to more Chat GPT users.

“The worst thing the company could do is to go in very aggressively, to do it in a way that's basically maximizing conversions and referrals but at the same time undermining people's confidence and trust in those recommendations,” Puntoni says. “Then, that will basically be the end of it, because there's no point using a chatbot you don't trust.”

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Key Takeaways

I Asked Chat GPT 500 Questions
Open AI is starting to stuff the free version of Chat GPT with ads
In my rough tests, the Chat GPT ads felt quite frequent
“Because Chat GPT is a trusted and personal environment for many people, we’re intentionally rolling ads out slowly,” an Open AI spokesperson tells WIRED
Overall, I saw ads for dog food, printers, hotel reservations, productivity software, movie tickets, food delivery apps, fashionable ties, streaming services, corporate credit cards, apartment furniture, cruise vacations, AI coding tools, freelance editors, skin-care articles, business internet plans, handmade gifts, grocery stores, and basketball tickets, among others