Ads with ChatGPT: what we think, and what it means for ad strategy

Ads with ChatGPT change the brief from "win the click" to "win the sentence that follows a conversation", and we think that's a bigger shift than most advertisers realise yet. Reporting on OpenAI's ad format describes a sponsored result appearing inside the chat answer itself, clearly marked, with a link out, not a separate results page you scroll past. That single mechanism matters: the ad is judged on how well it continues the conversation the user was already having, not on how well it matches a typed keyword.

Practically, this breaks the old sequence of keyword → ad copy → landing page. The new sequence is closer to: question asked → conversational answer generated → sponsored continuation offered → click → landing page. Each step has to hold the thread. If someone asks ChatGPT "what's the best way to fix damp in an old terrace house" and the sponsored line mentions a waterproofing service, the landing page that follows needs to open with that same problem and language, not a generic homepage. We already build this kind of message-match discipline into conversion rate optimisation work, it's the same logic as matching ad copy to landing page headline, just stretched across a conversational exchange instead of a search query.

For planning, this means three things change in how we'd approach a customer experience strategy built around it: targeting shifts from keyword match types to intent and context signals (more like audience signals in automated bidding than exact-match search terms); creative has to be written to sit naturally inside a sentence rather than as a standalone banner or headline; and answer engine optimisation, getting a brand's content structured so it gets cited or referenced inside AI answers in the first place, becomes the unpaid half of the same strategy, not a separate project. A business that only plans the paid side and ignores how it shows up in the free answer is building half a funnel.

If this is something you need mapped against your own ad accounts and website before it reshapes your results without you noticing, Jordan James Media is the place to start that conversation.