ChatGPT Ad Visits Earned $0.89 Versus $2.45 for Google Search

By Priya Raman

A visit from a ChatGPT ad generated $0.89 in revenue in U.S. traffic, against $2.45 for a visit from a paid Google search ad, according to a working paper by Maximilian Kaiser and Christian Schulze dated October 2026. 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.

The paper, under review, tracked 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. Kaiser is at the Vienna University of Economics and Business; Schulze is at the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. The data comes from Google Analytics e-commerce tracking provided free by Grips Intelligence, an e-commerce data company. Kaiser is a scientific advisor to Grips and previously worked there; the paper states the company had no role in the research and has no commercial relationship with OpenAI.

How big is the gap?

ChatGPT ad visits converted at 0.37 percent in U.S. traffic versus 1.17 percent for paid search. Comparing the two channels within the same websites, the conversion and revenue gaps persisted after accounting for device type and week.

The pattern held almost universally across advertisers:

• Of 87 advertisers that bought both ChatGPT ads and paid search in U.S. traffic, 84 earned less per ChatGPT ad visit.
• 73 of them recorded zero sales from their ChatGPT ads, across 18,726 visits between them.
• The remaining 14 advertisers generated all 570 ChatGPT ad purchases.
• One advertiser is responsible for 66 percent of all purchases made via paid ChatGPT across the 102 sites. Remove it, and both gaps widen.

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

What is the parity price?

Kaiser and Schulze use paid search as the benchmark for a parity price: the cost per click at which a ChatGPT ad click would generate equal revenue per advertising dollar as a paid search click. Sixteen accounts in their cost data had at least 80 percent of search traffic from the United States. Their median paid search click cost was $0.72. Scaled for the revenue-per-visit difference, that yields approximately $0.26 per ChatGPT click. Because one advertiser accounted for 76 percent of all U.S. paid ChatGPT revenue, resampling put the estimate anywhere between $0.05 and $0.57.

The $1.72-per-click figure comes from one account's 15 days of spend, as reported by Opascope, which runs paid media accounts for clients. It is more than six times the parity price. OpenAI's ads basics page recommends starting CPC campaigns at a maximum bid of $3 to $5.

The parity price assumes similar profit margins for both channels and counts only the one tracked visit. The authors found no detectable increase in traffic from other channels for advertisers compared with similar sites that had not bought ads in the weeks around each advertiser's first paid ChatGPT click — though the test can only rule out large increases.

Did ads hurt organic referrals?

The authors measured unpaid visits from ChatGPT's responses to 1,898 sites as a proxy for whether ads diminished the product's utility. Organic ChatGPT referrals over the first 13 weeks post-launch changed by an estimated −5.9 percent relative to organic search referrals to the same sites, and compared with the EU, where no advertising ran. That estimate ranges from −12.6 to +1.2 percent, a range that includes no change. Adjusting for ChatGPT's faster North American adoption using OpenAI's regional adoption index shifts the estimate to −7.2 to −8.4 percent, with ranges that exclude zero. The authors describe the overall effect as a moderate decrease of approximately 6 to 8 percent.

Before launch, the combined test found no clear difference in referral trends between rollout countries and the EU, but four of the five rollout groups failed that test on their own. The same combined test also flagged 49 of 100 simulated rollouts in which no ads ran. Conversion among organic visits that did arrive shifted just −0.02 percentage points from a 2.21 percent pre-launch baseline.

How the study worked

The first ChatGPT ads launched in the United States on Feb. 9, 2026, and reached Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Japan, Korea, Brazil and Mexico by early August. ChatGPT ads did not run in the European Union until Aug. 24, two days after the 60-week data window expired. The data captures the last click before each visit but excludes prompts, ad impressions and users' subscription tiers. Because advertisers chose to buy ChatGPT ads, the comparison reflects their results rather than proving the ads caused them.

What does this change for practitioners? You can calculate a parity price for your own account: divide ChatGPT ad revenue per visit by paid search revenue per visit, then multiply by your search cost per click. That is the price at which ChatGPT clicks match search on tracked revenue per dollar. It excludes profit margins and later purchases the last click does not capture. Check your ChatGPT ad sessions for ad-review crawler visits first: OpenAI's basics page says such crawlers can visit landing pages with tracking parameters, and third-party analytics tools may flag these as paid.

Other reported results are more favorable, though based on different metrics. On Aug. 31, OpenAI posted that an ecommerce advertiser achieved a return on ad spend of three times their investment over 28 days. DoubleVerify reported the attributed cost per acquisition for Weight Watchers was 15.3 percent below their benchmark.

The paper's data ends Aug. 22. OpenAI has since expanded ChatGPT Ads to 89 countries and says more than 100,000 advertisers have run campaigns; its Aug. 31 post said CPC and outcome-optimized bidding accounted for most campaigns. The authors suggest that because ChatGPT ad clicks appear as sponsored cards separate from the answer, they could be worth little — and that moving ads into the answer could raise click value while raising distrust of ChatGPT's answers. OpenAI's Oct. 21 post says its ads are labeled and kept apart from answers, and that it is "continuing to explore new ways for businesses to interact with consumers in more native ways in ChatGPT."