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Kartik Sharma is a serial entrepreneur with focus on AI implementation and education, deeply passionate about democratizing AI to solve complex problems and create future skil LESS … MORE
I was intrigued when I saw the news about ChatGPT starting ads in beta mode. The moment ChatGPT begins running ads, the internet quietly crosses a line it cannot uncross. This is not just another monetization experiment by a large platform. It is the beginning of a structural shift in how brands are discovered, trusted, and chosen. For years, marketers optimised for search engines that ranked links. Now they must contend with language models that rank meaning. Advertising inside ChatGPT will not behave like Google Search ads, and assuming it will is the fastest way to become invisible in the next era of discovery.
Search was always about retrieval. You typed a query, scanned blue links, clicked a result, and made a decision elsewhere. LLMs like ChatGPT collapse that journey. The answer is the destination. When ads enter this environment, they do not compete for clicks but for cognitive acceptance. A sponsored suggestion inside a conversational response is not perceived as an interruption. It feels closer to advice. That single shift changes everything. This is where Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO, becomes unavoidable. It is the practice of shaping how language models understand, recall, and recommend your brand when generating answers. In a world where ChatGPT runs ads, GEO becomes the substrate on which advertising effectiveness rests. If your brand does not already exist in the model’s mental map as credible, relevant, and contextually appropriate, no amount of paid placement will save you.
Think about how people ask questions today. They no longer search for “best protein powder India.” They ask, “I am trying to lose fat without hurting my cholesterol. What protein should I take?” This question pulls in health context, personal constraints, and intent. When ChatGPT answers, it synthesises knowledge from patterns it has seen before. If ads are injected into this flow, they will not be generic banners. They will be recommendations woven into reasoning. Brands that cannot be justified within that reasoning simply will not appear.
This is why ads inside ChatGPT will punish shallow brands. In traditional advertising, you could buy attention even if your product story was thin. In a generative environment, every recommendation implicitly answers “why.” Why this brand. Why this product. Why now. If the model cannot explain you, it cannot recommend you. GEO is about giving the model something explainable to work with. Brand discovery will therefore shift from visibility to legibility. It will no longer matter how loud you are across channels. What will matter is how clearly your brand is defined across the web in language models can parse. Brands that have relied on vague positioning will discover that ambiguity is fatal when machines mediate discovery.
There is a more provocative implication. Paid ads in ChatGPT may not help unknown brands break out at all. Instead, they may amplify incumbents with strong semantic authority. If the model already trusts certain brands as default answers, advertising becomes a reinforcement mechanism rather than a discovery lever. This creates a winner takes most dynamic at the language layer, not the traffic layer. From a technical perspective, this means marketers must think less like media buyers and more like knowledge engineers. You are no longer just buying impressions. You are feeding a system that predicts the most reasonable next sentence. GEO work involves mapping the questions that matter, auditing how models currently respond, and fixing representation gaps. It involves ensuring your brand appears consistently in trusted sources, with clear claims, evidence, and associations. Ads will then act as accelerants, not crutches. This also reshapes trust. Users already attribute a surprising level of authority to ChatGPT responses. When ads appear, the line between organic reasoning and paid influence will blur. The brands that survive this scrutiny will be those whose paid presence aligns with what the model would have said anyway.
The uncomfortable truth is that many brands are currently invisible to language models in any meaningful way. They exist as logos, landing pages, and campaigns, not as coherent entities with well understood roles in the world. When ChatGPT starts monetising attention, these brands will realise that discovery has moved upstream. You do not earn relevance at the moment of the click anymore. You earn it months or years earlier by shaping how machines learn you.
This is not the end of marketing. It is the end of lazy marketing. Ads inside ChatGPT will reward brands that have done the hard work of becoming understandable. The rest will shout into a
conversation where the listener has already made up its mind. The question is not whether ChatGPT ads will work. I am sure they will. The real question is who they will work for. In the age of generative answers, if your brand is not part of the model’s reasoning, you are not competing. You are simply paying to be politely ignored.
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Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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