Great ad business. Shame about the ads.

Impressions without intentions: Agencies testing ChatGPT Ads are getting clicks that go nowhere. One reported a 0.6% CTR against a usual 2%, at roughly $7 per click.

Worse, platform click counts aren’t matching Google Analytics. Add UTMs, and treat any spend as research budget.

Fair warning: geotargeting, custom audiences, and conversion optimization only landed in August 2026. So you can expect it to get better soon.

Meanwhile, the money prints itself: OpenAI’s ad business just hit a $1B annualized run rate in about 200 days.

Self-service access is rolling out across India, Europe, and MENA, with ads now available in 40+ countries.

Brussels noticed: The EU has designated ChatGPT a Very Large Online Search Engine, citing roughly 159.1M monthly EU recipients.

Within four months, that means a public ad repository. Translation: free competitor research.

Speaking of searching the web, Claude and Claude Code act like two separate engines. Claude searched in 93% of responses. Claude Code? 13%.

Their brand mentions overlapped by only 20%. Claude Code’s agent hits docs and pricing pages; Claude’s crawls sitemaps and homepages.

Same name, different playbooks.