Remember when ChatGPT was going to kill Google? When we’d all abandon search engines because AI would just give us the answers without all those annoying ads cluttering up our results?
Yeah, about that…
OpenAI announced recently that ads are coming to ChatGPT. Free users and the new $8/month “Go” tier will start seeing sponsored content at the bottom of their answers.
The irony is absolutely delicious.
From “uniquely unsettling” to “we need the money”
Sam Altman in May 2024: “Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me.” Advertising would be a “last resort.”
Sam Altman now: “It is clear to us that a lot of people want to use a lot of AI and don’t want to pay.”
Turns out “last resort” arrives pretty quickly when you’re burning through $8 billion a year and only 5% of your users are paying.
The Financial Times called OpenAI an “era-defining money furnace” – and they’re not wrong. ChatGPT has around 800 million users, but the vast majority want to use it for free. Sound familiar? It should. That’s exactly the problem Google solved with advertising 25 years ago.
Welcome to Google 2.0
So ChatGPT’s grand disruption of search now looks remarkably familiar – free access funded by advertising, premium ad-free tiers for those willing to pay, and promises that ads will “never” influence the results.
Where have I heard that before?
OpenAI swears “ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you” and they’ll “never sell your data to advertisers.”
Cute.
There are already reports of internal discussions about giving sponsored content “preferential treatment” in responses. One mockup apparently showed ads appearing in a sidebar next to ChatGPT’s answers. Another discussed promoting sponsored products directly within the AI’s recommendations.
But I’m sure that’s all just brainstorming. Nothing to worry about…
The revolution that became the establishment
This is a pattern that plays out constantly in tech. A new platform arrives promising to disrupt the old guard. It’s going to be different. It’s going to be better. It’s definitely not going to make money the same way those greedy incumbents do.
Then reality hits.
Running AI models is eye-wateringly expensive. Servers cost money. Engineers cost money. Training data costs money. And when your users won’t pay, there’s really only one other option.
ChatGPT isn’t overthrowing the advertising-funded search model. It’s joining it. The revolution isn’t storming the castle – it’s moving in and redecorating.
What this means for the GEO grifters
For the past year, I’ve watched “experts” selling expensive “Generative Engine Optimisation” services – the art of optimising specifically for AI search engines because Google is apparently dying.
Their pitch relies on AI search being fundamentally different from traditional search. A new frontier requiring new strategies. A complete paradigm shift that makes everything you know about SEO obsolete.
But if ChatGPT is just becoming Google with a chatbot interface, what exactly are these courses teaching you that’s so shiny and new?
The same fundamentals apply. Create helpful content. Build genuine expertise. Answer questions clearly. The AI doesn’t care if you’ve paid £2,000 for a GEO masterclass or £900 a month for a GEO “expert” – it cares whether your content is useful.
And now that ChatGPT is adding ads, the commercial incentives are aligning even more closely with traditional search. Businesses will pay to appear in ChatGPT results. The platform will need to balance user trust with advertising revenue. The same tensions that shape Google will shape AI search.
Some disruption.
The numbers still don’t lie
The GEO crowd still conveniently ignores one thing: AI search still drives a tiny fraction of most websites’ traffic.
Tracking data shows ChatGPT, Perplexity, and the other AI platforms everyone’s obsessing over are sending minimal visitors to most sites. Google continues to dominate. And most AI search prompts aren’t even commercial – people are mainly asking ChatGPT to write their shopping lists, not looking for businesses to buy from.
So not only is the traffic minimal, but what traffic exists is largely useless for most businesses anyway.
Now factor in that ChatGPT is about to start showing ads to free users. How long before those minimal referrals get even smaller as people get frustrated with sponsored content in their AI answers?
What does this mean for website owners?
If you’ve been losing sleep over “optimising for AI search” because Google is supposedly dying – take a breath.
ChatGPT isn’t replacing the advertising-funded search model. It’s copying it. The same rules apply:
Create content that genuinely helps people
Not content optimised for AI. Not content stuffed with schema markup because someone told you that’s the secret. Content that answers questions, solves problems, and demonstrates real expertise.
Build authority in your space
AI models pull information from sources they trust. The way you build that trust is the same way you’ve always built it – by being genuinely useful over time.
Stop throwing money at whatever shiny platform promises to change everything this week
The fundamentals of good marketing haven’t changed just because there’s a chatbot involved.
Focus on where your traffic really comes from
Check your analytics. For most businesses, that’s still Google by a massive margin. Optimise accordingly.
The AI search revolution is starting to look a lot like the old search reality – just with more hype and worse unit economics.
Because everything changes back to ads eventually.
