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ChatGPT Launched Ads This Month. Your Best Buyers Will Never See Them.

OpenAI's ChatGPT ads only reach free-tier users. Every paid subscriber, the B2B buyer doing real vendor research, is ad-free. The brands scrambling to spend $60 CPMs are buying access to the wrong audience. Here's what actually reaches your buyers.

Jaxon Parrott|
ChatGPT Launched Ads This Month. Your Best Buyers Will Never See Them.

On February 9, OpenAI launched ads in ChatGPT. TechCrunch covered the rollout as a structural shift in how AI platforms monetize. Marketers opened their wallets. Some committed $250,000 minimums.

Nobody said the thing that matters.

Those ads only reach users on ChatGPT's Free and Go tiers. OpenAI was explicit: "Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers will not have ads." Your enterprise buyers, the ones on paid subscriptions because they actually rely on the tool, aren't seeing your sponsored placement. They never will.

If you're running B2B, you just bought a billboard on the wrong road.

The Audience Problem Nobody Priced In

The CPMs are $60 per thousand views. Digiday confirmed that's on par with NFL game ad slots on streaming, premium pricing by any measure. Minimum commitments in early talks were running around $250,000, and OpenAI is only approaching the "biggest of the big" brands directly, bypassing agencies entirely.

For that price, you're reaching the free-tier crowd. Casual users. People who haven't committed $20 a month for Plus.

CNET confirmed that paid tiers, Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise, remain ad-free by design. OpenAI built that as a feature, not an oversight. Buyers with purchase authority who use ChatGPT seriously opted out of ads the moment they subscribed.

The brands in the first wave of tests are all consumer names, retailers, travel platforms, rental companies. That's not an accident. Consumer brands have a legitimate reason to reach free users at scale. B2B companies targeting CFOs and growth executives do not.

The moment a B2B marketer commits $250,000 to reach free-tier users at $60 CPMs, they've paid streaming-TV prices to talk to an audience that isn't their buyer.

Why This Is a Deeper Problem Than a Misdirected Media Buy

The CPM math is the obvious problem. The structural problem runs deeper.

MarTech analyzed more than 1,000 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, and Google AI Mode for 29 B2B tech companies, enterprise and midsize, spanning software, semiconductors, logistics, and industrial automation. The finding: only one in five of those brands appeared in more than 25% of the AI answers that mattered to them. One-third showed up in fewer than 5% of relevant answers.

These are established companies with content teams and category presence. They simply don't exist in the answers their buyers are getting from AI engines.

A sponsored placement beneath a ChatGPT answer doesn't fix that. It requires first that ChatGPT generates an answer relevant to your category. If your brand isn't being cited in the organic response, the ad appears next to content that's validating your competitors. You're sponsoring their credibility.

Search Engine Land noted that the ChatGPT ad launch forces a reckoning between paid and organic visibility strategies, marketers who haven't built organic citation standing are being pushed toward paid, not as a complement to organic reach but as a substitute for it. That's a losing position.

And here's what MarTech's data makes explicit: owned content can't close the gap either. "You can't build a GEO strategy purely on owned content," the research concluded. Brands that received the most AI citations still averaged only 31% visibility, a marginal improvement over simply being in the top-cited domains. Saturating your own site with AI-optimized content produces diminishing returns fast.

What moves the number is third-party credibility, being cited in the publications that AI systems are trained to trust.

What AI Systems Actually Cite

The mechanism isn't complicated. AI engines cite what editors and publications have already validated. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, they pull from the same set of trusted third-party sources. A brand that appears consistently in outlets those systems weight heavily gets surfaced in organic answers, across every subscription tier, without a media budget.

That's PR's original mechanism: earned media in publications that matter. The difference now is that it does double duty. It builds credibility with human readers and with the machines answering their questions. The citation in a respected outlet that made a CMO trust your brand is the same citation an LLM pulls when a buyer asks "who's the best option for this."

This is what Machine Relations names as a discipline, the systematic work of earning the third-party citations that make machines cite your brand. Not content optimization. Not schema markup. Earned placement in the sources the algorithm's trusted publishers already validated.

Brands that started that work before ChatGPT launched ads aren't scrambling to reach the free tier at $60 CPMs. They're in the organic answer for the paying user who never sees ads at all. The playbook for building organic citation across ChatGPT and Perplexity starts with the same foundation, which publishers AI engines pull from, and how to earn placement there before your buyer's next search.

Key Takeaways

  • ChatGPT ads are tier-locked: Free and Go users only. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education users see no ads, confirmed by OpenAI.
  • $60 CPMs, $250K minimums: Digiday reports pricing on par with premium streaming inventory, for an audience that skews consumer, not enterprise.
  • B2B AI visibility is already low: MarTech research found only 21% of B2B tech brands appear in more than 25% of relevant AI answers. Ads don't fix organic invisibility.
  • Owned content has limits: Even the most-cited B2B domains averaged only 31% AI visibility. Third-party earned media is the actual lever.
  • The organic tier is ad-free and unreachable by paid media: Earned citations reach every subscriber. Ads reach only the cheapest tier.

Related Reading

The Prior Question

Before any B2B brand commits to ChatGPT ad spend, there's a prior question: what does an AI system say about you when a buyer asks about your category?

Not what your website says. What ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude say when someone types in the problem you solve.

If the answer doesn't include you, or mentions you once, weakly, alongside three competitors, no ad budget fixes that. You're not in the organic answer. You're asking to be noticed in the footnote beneath someone else's credibility.

The visibility audit is where that work starts. Map where you appear, where you don't, and which publications are driving the citations that matter for your category. Then build toward the third-party credibility that compounds over time.

ChatGPT ads are a real channel for consumer brands with the right audience on the free tier. For most B2B companies, that's not the play. The play is getting cited before the ad question comes up.

Your buyers are already asking ChatGPT about your category. The question is whether the answer includes you, or just your competitors, with your $60 CPM ad underneath.