Data finds ChatGPT ad visits brought advertisers a fraction of paid search's revenue per visit in U.S. traffic, and most saw no sales from them.

In U.S. traffic, a visit from a ChatGPT ad brought in $0.89 in revenue, against $2.45 for a visit from a paid Google search ad, according to a working paper by Maximilian Kaiser and Christian Schulze.

The paper, dated October 2026 and under review, follows site traffic and sales through OpenAI’s country-by-country ad launch. Its paid-ad figures come from 102 advertiser sites with full sales tracking.

At paid search’s rate of return, the authors value a ChatGPT ad click at about $0.26. The largest publicly known account paid $1.72 per click.

OpenAI’s ads FAQ says ChatGPT Ads “does not yet have performance benchmarks across advertisers, industries, or campaign types.”

ChatGPT ad visits converted at 0.37 percent in U.S. traffic versus 1.17 percent with paid search. When the authors compared the two channels within the same websites, they found the conversion and revenue gaps still existed even after accounting for type of device used and week.

Among the 87 advertisers who purchased both ChatGPT ads and paid search in U.S. traffic, 84 had lower earnings per ChatGPT ad visit than with paid search. A total of 73 had zero sales generated by their ChatGPT ads (across 18,726 visits between them) while the remaining 14 generated all 570 ChatGPT ad purchases.

One advertiser is responsible for 66 percent of all purchases made via paid ChatGPT across the 102 sites.

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