ChatGPT Ads Are Expanding — And That Could Change How Expert Businesses Are Discovered
By Wendy Keir | EmpowerAi™
OpenAI has expanded advertising inside ChatGPT into the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea.
At one level, this is simply another step in OpenAI's commercial strategy. ChatGPT is growing rapidly, and advertising provides another way to support that growth alongside subscriptions.
I think the more interesting story sits somewhere else.
This is not Google introducing another search advert. OpenAI is beginning to build an advertising platform around conversations, and that changes the nature of how people discover products, services and expertise.
Search has always depended on keywords. Conversations are different because they reveal intent.
When someone opens Google, they usually reduce a problem to a few carefully chosen words. They might search for business coach, leadership book or AI consultant. By the time they type those words, they have already narrowed the problem down to something specific.
ChatGPT works differently.
People tend to arrive with uncertainty rather than certainty. They explain what is happening, describe the situation they are facing and often think their way through the problem while they are talking. Someone might explain that they have written a nonfiction book and are trying to decide how to create additional value from it. Another person might describe years of consultancy experience and wonder how they could turn that expertise into intellectual property. Someone else may simply say they feel their business has stopped growing and they are unsure why.
That conversation tells the AI far more than a search query ever could.
OpenAI says advertisements can be matched to the subject of the conversation, previous chats and previous interactions with advertisements, while making it equally clear that advertisers do not have access to users' conversations, memories or personal information. Sponsored content is kept separate from ChatGPT's answers and does not influence the responses themselves.
That separation is important because trust is one of the reasons people are increasingly using conversational AI in the first place.
What interests me is not the advertising itself. It is the point at which advertising now appears.
People are increasingly using AI before they visit a website, before they search for a supplier and sometimes before they have even worked out what they actually need. They explore ideas, compare different approaches and gradually refine their thinking through conversation. By the time they eventually arrive at a business, they often have a much clearer understanding of the problem they are trying to solve.
That creates a very different commercial moment.
Traditional search advertising tends to appear once somebody has already decided what category of solution they are looking for. Conversational advertising has the potential to appear while that decision is still forming. Rather than responding to a keyword, it responds to the broader context of what someone is trying to achieve.
For expert-led businesses, I think this could become particularly significant.
Most experts do not struggle because they lack knowledge. They already have years of experience, proven frameworks and valuable intellectual property. Their challenge is usually that the right people never discover that expertise.
A consultant might have developed a methodology over twenty years. An author may have created a framework that genuinely changes the way people think. A coach may have a programme capable of solving a very specific problem. None of those things matter if the people who need them never come across them.
Conversational AI could begin changing that.
Someone discussing how to turn a consultancy into intellectual property may eventually discover a specialist who has already solved that problem. An author wondering how to extend the value of a nonfiction book beyond publication may come across ideas they would never have searched for directly. The discovery happens because the AI understands the wider conversation rather than relying on a handful of keywords.
I don't think this replaces search.
It simply adds another layer to how people find expertise.
There is also an interesting implication for authors.
Books have always depended on discovery. Readers find them through bookshops, recommendations, podcasts, reviews, newsletters, search engines and increasingly through social media. Conversational AI introduces another possible route.
A reader might explain the challenge they are facing and ask ChatGPT what they should read. They may not know the title of a book or even realise that a particular framework exists. They are describing the problem rather than searching for the solution.
If publishers and authors eventually advertise within ChatGPT, that could create an entirely new discovery channel.
It would also require very clear boundaries.
Readers need to understand the difference between a recommendation ChatGPT has made independently and one that has been sponsored. OpenAI appears to recognise this by keeping advertisements visually separate from organic responses and making it clear that they do not influence the answers.
That distinction matters because conversational AI depends on trust. Once people begin to question whether the conversation is being shaped by commercial interests, the experience changes.
This also raises an interesting question for AI Book Companion™.
A Companion is built around the author's own intellectual property. It exists to help readers explore the author's ideas, apply their frameworks and continue learning after they have finished the book. The relationship is built on a clear understanding that the conversation is governed by the author's work.
As conversational AI develops commercial models alongside those experiences, the architecture behind a Companion becomes even more important.
The reader needs to know what comes from the author's approved material, what has been generated by the AI to explain or apply those ideas and where any commercial content sits. Those boundaries should never become blurred.
For me, this is one of the reasons governance matters so much. Good AI is not simply about generating convincing conversations. It is about making sure those conversations remain faithful to the knowledge they are built upon and transparent about where that knowledge comes from.
More broadly, I think this announcement tells us something about the direction of AI itself.
People are beginning to use ChatGPT less like a search engine and more like somewhere they go to think. They work through decisions, explore possibilities and refine their understanding before taking action. That shift changes how expertise is discovered because the conversation itself becomes part of the journey.
Advertising is only one consequence of that change.
The bigger story is that discovery is becoming conversational.
For expert-led businesses, authors and educators, that means visibility may depend less on ranking for the right keyword and more on having clearly articulated expertise that AI can understand, explain and connect to the people who genuinely need it.
I suspect we are only seeing the very beginning of that shift.
Three Key Insights
- ChatGPT is creating an advertising environment around conversations rather than search terms, changing how people discover expertise.
- Conversational AI captures intent more effectively than traditional keyword search because people explain their situation before they know exactly what they need.
- As conversational discovery grows, clearly defined intellectual property and governed AI experiences such as AI Book Companion™ become increasingly valuable because they combine trusted expertise with natural interaction.
Three Questions I'm Thinking About
- Will conversational AI eventually become a more important discovery channel than search for expert-led businesses?
- How should publishers and authors distinguish between genuine recommendations and sponsored visibility inside AI conversations?
- As AI increasingly helps people make decisions, what responsibility do platforms have to preserve trust and transparency?
Sources
- OpenAI – Testing Ads in ChatGPT
https://openai.com/index/our-approach-to-advertising-and-expanding-access/ - OpenAI – News
https://openai.com/news/
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