ChatGPT's advertising experiment is producing uneven results depending on where in the world the ads run, and the U.S. isn't the strongest market so far.
A new analysis of click behavior inside ChatGPT found that click-through rates (CTR)—the percentage of people who see an ad and click it—crossed the 1% mark in four countries outside the United States. In the U.S., the rate stayed below that threshold. The data comes from browser and app panel tracking rather than figures OpenAI itself has published, so it offers an outside look at a feature the company hasn't detailed in depth publicly.
For context, a 1% CTR isn't spectacular by digital advertising standards. Google Search ads typically average somewhere between 2% and 5% depending on industry, while display and banner ads often sit well under 1%. Social platforms like Facebook and Instagram usually land in the 1% to 2% range. So ChatGPT's early ad performance looks more like banner-ad territory than search-ad territory in most markets, and somewhat below even that in the U.S.
The report also tracked something less commonly discussed: how often the roster of top advertisers on the platform changes. A high rate of turnover suggests many brands are testing the format briefly, then pulling back, rather than a stable set of advertisers settling in for the long haul. That kind of churn is typical in the early days of any new ad inventory, before targeting, pricing, and formats mature.
This matters because ChatGPT ads are a recent addition to a product that built its user base as a free, ad-free assistant. The shift toward monetizing that traffic puts OpenAI in the same position Google, Facebook, and more recently Perplexity have all occupied: turning a tool people use for free into one that pays for itself through advertising, usually with mixed results at first.