It’s confirmed. OpenAI will start testing paid advertising inside ChatGPT, marking the first time ads will appear inside one of the world’s most widely used AI tools.
Initial rollout will apply to users in the United States only, for free and “Go” users, with paid subscribers being excluded from seeing ads. Despite New Zealand and Australia benign excluded from this first phase it points to a broader shift in consumer behaviour and how people discover products and services online.
The ads will appear separately from the responses according to OpenAI and be clearly labelled as sponsored as well as not influence the answers generated. They also stated that users' information will not be used to target advertisers, although whether this holds up especially on scale, is another story.
Ads will sit below relevant responses rather than being embedded directly into answers. The more significant change is when those ads appear.
ChatGPT is already being used for the same queries that used to start on Google. People ask it to compare options, shortlist providers, or help them decide what to buy. These questions tend to happen late in the decision process rather than at the start.
For more than two decades, Google Ads owned that moment. Someone searched, clicked a few links, compared options, and made a decision. AI tools speed up that whole process significantly. Instead of ten tabs, people get a summary and a recommendation in one place.
“If ads begin appearing at the point where someone is already close to choosing, that changes the economics of attention,” says Caleb Young, Founder of Impacto Agency, a New Zealand-based digital strategy agency. “The value is no longer just visibility. It’s whether your brand is seen as credible enough to be considered at all.”
For businesses in Australia and New Zealand this doesn’t have an immediate impact. This is a US-only test and OpenAI hasn’t shared timelines for other regions. That said, we’ve seen this pattern before. Features such as Performance Max and AI Overviews both launched offshore before expanding locally.
What matters here isn’t whether search ads disappear. It’s how discovery is shifting. Traditional paid search is built around keywords and clicks. AI-driven interfaces prioritise other things like context, authority, and trust. Being mentioned or recommended within an AI-assisted workflow may carry more weight than ranking first on a results page as with traditional SEO.
There are still plenty of unanswered questions. How advertisers get selected. What success actually looks like. And how users respond to ads inside conversational tools. And how OpenAI balances commercial pressure with its promise to keep answers independent.
“What we’re seeing is AI becoming an intermediary, not just a tool,” Young says. “Platforms like ChatGPT are starting to sit between intent and action. That has implications for how brands structure their content, messaging, and digital presence.”
Agencies like Impacto have already begun helping businesses adapt to this shift by focusing less on traffic volume and more on authority, and how information is interpreted by AI systems.
For Australian and New Zealand businesses, this isn’t a reason to panic. Google isn’t going away overnight. But it is another reminder that paid discovery keeps evolving, and that trust and consistency are becoming just as important as visibility.
As AI tools start doing more of the research and comparison work, advertisers will need to think less about where ads sit and more about whether people trust them before they’re ready to decide.
This test may be limited for now. The direction it points in is not.
