You were promised an AI gold rush, yet nobody mentioned the map’s still being drawn.

Big number, bigger asterisk: OpenAI wants $100B in ad revenue by 2030, but Emarketer sees the entire US chatbot ad market topping out at $5.41B.

Its ad business is on pace to miss its own forecast by 90%.

Early days though: ChatGPT Ads Manager is quietly adding new features, this time Attributed Sales Value and Sales ROAS, plus product-level reporting.

Interestingly, retail-grade metrics are arriving before basics like CvR. Hm.

And a citation isn’t a click: New Bocconi research finds ChatGPT refers out in just 5.2% of sessions versus Google’s 31.1%, so being named in an answer may rarely send anyone your way.

Our take? Users expect to stay on the chatbot and find all answers in its interface. Which also might be a reason why ChatGPT ads aren’t as effective at the moment.

It’s a matter of trust, too: Only 28% of Americans trust AI search versus 70% for search engines, and heavy AI users are the ones most likely to click through and verify. Be the source they find.

And the receipts may become mandatory: Germany’s ZAK regulator ruled Google’s AI Overviews and Perplexity are content providers, not neutral pipes, and subject to media law. Google’s appealing.

We’’ll keep sharing the bits and pieces of the “AI gold rush” map as they come.