Many media agencies are not seeing the results they expect from advertising campaigns on ChatGPT. This is happening despite the improvements OpenAI says it implemented to better reach target audiences.
Peter Jaffray, managing director and privacy officer at Canadian digital marketing agency Choice OMG, told MediaPost that he had run a small-scale campaign aimed at users in Ontario and Alberta. The campaign did not generate a single interested buyer. According to Jaffray, the ads were actually shown and the costs were low.
The ads currently only reach users of the free version of ChatGPT, Jaffray said. He spent a total of $415 on three campaigns.
OpenAI only began offering options for geographic targeting and custom audiences in August 2026. At the same time, the company introduced features for conversion optimisation, the OpenAI Pixel Conversions API, and third-party measurement.
Nicholas Verity, CEO of B2B lead-generation agency Cleverly, also recently tested ads on ChatGPT, but has since stopped. Like Jaffray, he saw reasonable click-through rates, but not a single conversion.
According to Verity, the figures did not match reality. He said there may be something wrong with the measurement data or that clicks from the same user are being counted twice. As a result, he saw no reason to put more money into the campaigns.
Even so, Verity expects ChatGPT to become an important advertising channel in the long term. In his view, OpenAI has both a lot of search intent and a large reach. He expects the platform and measurement methods to improve significantly over the next six months.
Other marketers are also reporting similar experiences. Daniel Johnson, founder of We Scale Startups, wrote on LinkedIn that he saw the same thing when testing ChatGPT ads for several clients. The number of recorded clicks, he said, did not always match the figures in Google Analytics.
Johnson therefore advises advertisers to be cautious for now about scaling up campaigns. As long as the platform’s reporting is not reliable enough, ad budgets should mainly be regarded as money for experiments and research, he said.
Ryan Edwards, co-founder of SEO and AI search strategy firm Camino5, said he recognises the problems Verity described. In a response on LinkedIn, he spoke about a campaign in which around $1,000 was spent on ChatGPT ads. Although clicks were recorded, there was no corresponding data in Google Analytics, he said.
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