The story this week isn’t a Google update. It’s OpenAI turning ChatGPT into an ad platform.
On July 22, OpenAI opened “Advertise in ChatGPT” — a self-serve Ads Manager. Any business with a credit card can now set up a campaign, pick a budget, and get placed inside ChatGPT conversations. Best Buy, Lowe’s, and VistaPrint are the early names running it. Best Buy’s media lead put it plainly: they want to be in the room when the research and the decision happen inside a chat window instead of a search bar.
Here’s how it actually works:
1. Ads show as clearly labeled sponsored boxes at the bottom of a ChatGPT response.
→ Free and $8/month Go users see them. Plus, Team, and Enterprise stay ad-free.
2. Targeting isn’t keyword-based like Google.
→ OpenAI builds campaigns around what’s actually inside the conversation — the context, not just a search term.
3. This isn’t a side hustle for OpenAI anymore.
→ At Cannes Lions this year, OpenAI described itself as an advertising business and is projecting $2.5 billion in ad revenue for 2026. That’s not a pilot. That’s a business line.
What this means if you run marketing for a Nigerian brand:
Self-serve billing on ChatGPT ads isn’t live here yet, and naira-denominated spend on it isn’t a near-term option for most SMEs I work with. But that’s not the point. The point is where your customer’s research now happens. If someone in Lagos is asking ChatGPT “which is the best skincare brand for oily skin in Nigeria” before they ever type it into Google, your SEO content still needs to exist — because that’s what these models are trained on and increasingly cite. Search Everywhere Optimization isn’t a buzzword I made up for engagement. This is the proof.
My advice this week: audit whether your brand shows up when you ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity questions your customers would actually ask. If you’re invisible there, fix your content before you worry about ad budgets on platforms that haven’t reached us yet.
Is your brand showing up in AI answers, or just in Google? Bring your screenshots to the community, I’ll go through a few live.
Join the tribe → digitrybe.com/community
