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ChatGPT Ads Launch February. They're Charging Per View, Not Click. |
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OpenAI is launching ads in ChatGPT in early February. The pricing model they've chosen tells you everything you need to know about AI search behaviour.
They're charging per impression, not per click.
As Glenn Gabe put it: "Pay per view. OMG what does that tell you about clicks from ChatGPT?"
It tells you OpenAI knows click-through rates from ChatGPT are low. If clicks were strong, they'd charge per click - that's how you maximise revenue.
What we know:
• ChatGPT has 900 million weekly active users
• OpenAI is asking advertisers for <$1M commitments for a several-week trial
• No self-serve yet - it's manual, just like early Google Ads
• Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscriptions will NOT include ads
• Ads appear "at the bottom of answers" - clearly labelled, based on conversation context
The format is new. OpenAI says users will soon be able to "directly ask the questions you need to make a purchase decision" - interactive ads you can talk to. That's a different creative challenge than any ad you've ever bought.
What this means for you:
If you're planning Q1 paid media budgets, this is a new channel opening up. The targeting is conversation-based - your ad shows up because of what someone just asked, not their demographic profile. Start thinking about what questions your customers ask that should lead to your product.
Meanwhile, Google's DeepMind CEO says Gemini has "no plans" for ads.
Read more:
👉 OpenAI Lines Up Advertisers, Reveals Key Details Ahead of Ads Launch - The Information
👉 Our approach to advertising and expanding access to ChatGPT - OpenAI
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I spent the past week reading and listening to earnings call transcripts from the last few months. Not press releases. Not thought leadership. The legally required disclosures where CFOs and CEOs tell shareholders where the money is actually going. I've picked out the highlights. Here's what they're saying:
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IAC (Dotdash Meredith - People, Investopedia, Allrecipes, Better Homes & Gardens):
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“
60-ish percent of our traffic came from Google Search and now it's down to 24%. So we can see the other side of this. We know what the world looks like, where Google is a very limited source...I think what you're asking is how do we fill the sessions gap to keep sessions healthy as part of our mix. That's a combination of a whole bunch of things. It's our own e-mails, it's Google Discover, which is their version of Apple News.It's traffic from direct, it's referral traffic. It's traffic from our direct consumer things we've built...
If you zoom out a little bit and you take a look at the broader AI deal landscape, which is obviously of great interest to us and to many of you guys. There seems to be 2 types of deals happening in the world, sort of like this deal, the a la carte Microsoft type deal, which is a marketplace, a vibrant marketplace where people can buy content as they need it, or broad use deals like we have with OpenAI, kind of the all-you-can-eat deal, where people can access our content as much as they would like. We are very happy in either model. Both can be viable as long as our content is respected and paid for.
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Neil Vogel - Chief Executive Officer of People Inc - Earnings Call - 4th Nov 2025
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Translation: A major digital media company went from 60% Google-dependent to 24%. They survived. They diversified into email, Google Discover, Apple News, direct traffic, and AI licensing deals (OpenAI, Microsoft).
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“
We're embedding agentic AI in numerous places throughout our products and systems to create smarter, faster and more intuitive experiences for both consumers and dealers...
We also continue to scale AI-driven content and quality improvements across the platform to drive consumer traffic and reduce operational overhead across internal teams. SEO content generation powered by generative AI and guided by our editorial expertise has expanded high-quality content roughly tenfold across CarGurus and our core channels, driving a 60% increase in top and mid-funnel sessions year-to-date. Pricing compliance monitoring now also uses AI to identify inconsistencies and ensure data integrity across millions of listings.
Internally, AI is transforming how teams work...Nearly 80% of managed leads in October, chat and text were handled and closed by AI. This automation has enabled us to reduce the outsourced team by over 40%, driving meaningful efficiency gains and cost reduction... Engineering productivity has risen by nearly 25% in the past year through the use of AI coding tools and code review agents...
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Jason Trevisan - CEO, CFO, Principal Accounting Officer & Director - Earnings Call - 6th Nov 2025
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Translation: They've put AI to work - content, lead handling, price monitoring, engineering.
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“
If you have a very strong brand and affinity and you stay on top of things with the consumer, you don't necessarily have to pay a lot to another platform just because some people are searching there, just like it is for Google today. That's the position we're coming from. That's the position that we're intending to stay in. And that's part of what we're thinking about here over the next 5 years...
LLMs, applications, usage of AI are unfolding at pace. Someone said that AI today might be at the equivalent stage of dial-up of Internet itself. Imagine what happened in the ensuing years. Nobody actually knows, again, what that curve of technology will evolve to, but we assume it will be rapid, and we want to be in a strong spot on it.
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Johan Svanstrom - CEO & Executive Director - Earnings Call - 8th Nov 2025
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Translation: Not everyone's answer is "pay for AI visibility." Rightmove's bet: build a brand so strong that the platforms need you, not the other way around. The moat isn't GEO. It's brand.
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“
41% of the time we're appearing in the Google 0 or #1 slot versus 10 other companies. This is a commanding achievement. This is attributable to 2 years of hard work and SEO planning...
There's another new channel developing, which is Reddit. If we look at how the AI engines are searching now...they are also looking at newer sources such as Reddit. So we're working very hard as well in this channel for patient education discussing our scientific efforts.
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Louis Scafuri - Chief Executive Officer - Earnings Call - 4th Nov 2025
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Translation: They're seeding Reddit - not just for community engagement, but because AI uses it. Reddit isn't just a social strategy anymore.
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Future (TechRadar, Tom's Guide, PC Gamer):
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“
There is a shift in audience. Our brands and our customers are looking for visibility in large language models. Just like we work to be the best at SEO, we work to be the best at LLMs. And we can transform this knowledge into bespoke advertising packages for our clients... Samsung was looking to promote one of its products and wanted visibility in AI as well as on authoritative brands like Tom's Guide. We produced a bespoke package for them, helping to educate humans and bots with accurate up-to-date information. The outcome was an uplift in mentions between 23% to 33% and close to 5,000 LLM citations...We have sold it to other tech and luxury clients... and the pipeline is building.
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Li Ying Kevin - CEO & Director - Earnings Call - 4th Dec 2025
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Translation: Future plc turned GEO-as-a-service into a new revenue stream. It's called Future Optic. Samsung bought it and saw 23-33% more AI mentions and 5,000 LLM citations.
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“
We're also seeing that the traffic from the answer engine is growing. And I think we had over 77,000 citations through the period that we talked about. But interestingly enough, it's not just that we're seeing increased traffic coming from these sources...
The conversion to members is 2 to 3x what it was from what it is from search... And so what we really also think we're seeing is that the AI answer engines are filtering out some of the traffic that actually was not buyers.
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Gary Nugent - CEO & Director - Earnings Call - 10th Nov 2025
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Translation: For techTarget, AI traffic converts 2-3x better because AI pre-qualifies the audience. The casual browsers get their answer and leave. The serious buyers click through. 77,000 citations and counting.
Building direct integrations with AI, seeding content where AI looks, and treating AI citations as a measurable, buyable asset. That's what's being reported to shareholders.
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Meanwhile, elsewhere this week in search and AI...
Apple Is Replacing Siri With A Full ChatGPT-Style Chatbot
Coming September with iOS 27: Apple is rebuilding Siri as a full conversational AI chatbot - one that searches the web, generates content, and answers questions like ChatGPT. The brain behind it? Google Gemini, running on Google TPUs.
What this means: A billion iPhones are about to have a chatbot built into the home button. Voice search, web search, and AI answers are converging in your customers' pockets.
👉 Apple Plans a Conversational Siri, Discusses Google TPU Deal - The Information
👉 Apple to Revamp Siri as a Built-In iPhone, Mac Chatbot to Fend Off OpenAI - Bloomberg
ChatGPT Is Taking 4% Of Your Shopify Sales - Starting Sunday
January 26th - three days from now - Shopify merchants will be able to sell directly through AI chatbot checkouts: ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot.
The catch: OpenAI takes a 4% fee on every ChatGPT checkout sale. Google and Microsoft currently charge nothing. Your products will appear in AI responses by default - the only question is whether you let customers check out inside the AI (and pay the fee) or force them to your site.
Why this matters: AI just became a sales channel, not just a discovery channel. Transactions are happening inside the chat window. No click to your site.
👉 ChatGPT Checkouts to Take 4% Cut of Shopify Merchant Sales - The Information
You May Be Blocking The Wrong AI Bots
Your team might be blocking AI crawlers to "protect IP." But there are two types of bots:
• Training bots - teach AI what your brand is
• Assistant bots - answer questions about you in real-time
Block the wrong one and AI literally forgets who you are. When a customer asks ChatGPT about your category, you won't exist in its memory.
The data: 79% of top news sites now block at least one AI training bot. 71% also block live retrieval bots - meaning they won't show up in AI citations. But IAB Tech Lab says it's "never too late to block" because AI models must re-crawl constantly to stay current.
Action: Audit your robots.txt. Know which bots you're blocking and why. The distinction between training and retrieval matters.
👉 More Sites Blocking LLM Crawling – Could That Backfire On GEO? - Search Engine Journal
👉 Eight in Ten of World’s Biggest News Websites now Block AI Training Bots - Press Gazette
Organic Traffic Is Down 2.5%, Not 25%
New analysis from Graphite using Similarweb data on 40,000+ top US websites: organic search traffic is down just 2.5% year-over-year - nowhere near the 25-60% drops cited in industry commentary.
Why this matters: The collapse isn't happening.
👉 Organic Search Traffic is Down 2.5% YoY, New Data Shows - Search Engine Land
ChatGPT Searches Google Shopping - Your Feed Is Your AI Strategy
Semrush analysed how ChatGPT recommends products. The finding: 75% of the time, ChatGPT's top product recommendation comes from Google Shopping's top 3 results.
Why this matters: If you're in ecommerce, your Google Shopping feed just became your AI visibility strategy. The same product data that drives Shopping ads is now what ChatGPT pulls from.
👉 ChatGPT Searches Google Shopping to Create its Recommendations
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How a 2am Joke Became Google's AI Brand
Google's image generator has one of the strangest names in tech. Nano Banana.
It wasn't the result of a branding study. It was a Product Manager at 2:30 in the morning.
Google needed to test their new image model - the official name ("Gemini 2.5 Flash Image") would've revealed the creator immediately. They needed a codename, fast.
"At 2:30 a.m., one of the PMs messaged me saying we needed to submit it," said Naina Raisinghani, a Google Product Manager. "I said, 'OK, how about something funny like Nano Banana?'"
The name was approved instantly. Probably because everyone was exhausted.
It stuck. When the model launched publicly, Google leaned in - peeled-banana logo, yellow interface button, the whole thing. They even named the successor Nano Banana Pro.
The meaning? "Some of my friends call me Naina Banana, and others call me Nano because I'm short and I like computers. So I just smushed my two nicknames together."
That 2am joke? Nano Banana Pro just hit 1 billion images in under two months.
👉 Google Nano Banana name origin: The funny story behind the AI - Tbreak Media
👉 The Gemini App Has Generated 1 Billion Nano Banana Pro Images In Under Two Months - 9To5 Google
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Michael Chidzey, Editor of The Signal
The web’s noisy. The Signal cuts through it.
I built my first website in ’98. And I never stopped. Growth became the craft. Craft became Good Signals.
At Good Signals, we help brands that deserve to do better online - do just that. From scaling startups and e-commerce stores, to managing complex websites and guiding billion-pound organisations, the mission’s always been the same: build growth that lasts, and makes business - and the web - better. |
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