ChatGPT launched ads: a journalist asked 500 questions and examined what the bot shows

OpenAI has done what many expected but feared to say aloud: ChatGPT now displays ads. Commercial advertisements have appeared on the free tier in the US — and a Wired journalist decided not to wait for this to affect him, but conducted his own experiment: 500 questions to the bot, 500 chances to see how the advertising machine works inside the world's most popular AI chatbot. OpenAI confirmed the launch of ads in early 2025.

The company has long hinted that monetization through subscription is not the only path. Generative AI is expensive to maintain: billions of tokens processed daily require enormous computational resources. Free ChatGPT users, numbering in the hundreds of millions, have continued using the service without any direct monetization from advertisers.

Now that has changed.

The journalist methodically asked ChatGPT 500 questions from various fields: finance, health, travel, technology, everyday household tasks. The goal was to understand the pattern: how much is the advertising connected to the context of the request, how intrusive is it, and how it's integrated into the interface. This is not a superficial test — 500 questions provide a statistically significant sample.

The results were revealing. Advertising does not appear constantly or randomly — it is tied to the conversation topic. Questions about travel triggered announcements from travel services, financial requests — ads from banks and investment platforms. At the same time, the announcements are presented neatly: they do not interrupt the answer, but appear next to it, not imitating the content.

OpenAI, it seems, is trying to balance commercial pressure with user trust. One of the main concerns when launching ads in AI assistants is that the bot will begin to "recommend" paid products within its answers, disguising advertising as advice. This hasn't happened yet: the distinction between ads and answers remains. However, many questions still remain.

How exactly does OpenAI transmit query data to advertisers? Is data stored for targeting? The company has provided minimal information about the technical side of the system.

This creates a zone of uncertainty: the user doesn't know whether their request becomes a signal for a real-time advertising auction — as happens in Google search. The scale of the potential audience is colossal. ChatGPT is one of the fastest-growing products in internet history.

Hundreds of millions of people monthly trust it with their questions, tasks, ideas. Converting this traffic into advertising inventory is a logical business move, but it carries consequences for how users perceive AI answers. Even if ads don't penetrate into the text itself, the mere fact of their presence changes the context.

OpenAI's competitors are taking a wait-and-see position for now. Google Gemini is embedded in the company's ecosystem, which earns trillions on advertising. Anthropic, Meta, and other players have not yet announced plans to launch ads in their AI assistants. But if OpenAI's experiment proves financially successful, the industry will likely follow the same path.

ChatGPT's advertising monetization is a signal about which direction the generative AI industry is heading. Free access to a smart AI assistant no longer implies that the user is a customer. As in the search engine era, they risk becoming a product once again.