Advertising inside ChatGPT arrived with a promise that the assistant already knows what the user wants. So far, that hasn’t entirely been the case.
Searchable, the AI visibility platform, analysed more than 11,000 ads served inside real ChatGPT conversations between 4 July and 4 August 2026, pairing every ad with the conversation it appeared in, then grading how closely the advertised product matched what the user was asking about.
After assessing every ad according to one of three relevancy bands, a third (33%) of ads were found to be unrelated, with no connection to the conversation at all.
Just over a quarter (27%) were a direct match, advertising the specific product the user was asking about. The largest group, 40%, were a contextual match, connected to something the user had raised earlier in the thread but not to the question in front of them.
Two thirds of ads landed in conversations with no purchase intent anywhere inside them
More than two-thirds (68%) of ads appeared in conversations where the user showed no sign of wanting to buy, book, hire or compare anything, at any point in the thread. Advertisers are seeing a large share of paid impressions appearing where no purchase was ever likely.
Counted by conversation rather than by ad, 40% of ad-carrying chats contained at least one ad unrelated to the discussion, and in 28% every ad served was unrelated to the topic the user was discussing.
In paid search, the advertiser picks the keywords that signal a buyer. ChatGPT’s ad platform works with context hints, where advertisers describe the conversations, situations and topics they want to appear in and OpenAI matches those against a live conversation. This takes place inside an AI engine that people also use to write, study, troubleshoot, and think through problems.
The mismatch rate more than doubles between sectors
Which sector an advertiser sits in predicts how badly its ads misfire. 47% of marketing and B2B services ads and 45% of software and SaaS ads were unrelated, the two worst rates of any sector measured.
The most relevant targeting came from data brokers and background checks at 50%, travel at 43% and automotive at 42%. No sector managed a direct relevancy match for ads more than half the time.
Insurance was rarely unrelated at 23% and rarely a direct match at 11%, because two thirds of its ads fall in the contextual band, attached to a life event somewhere in the thread rather than to the question being asked.
OpenAI said its ads are becoming more relevant
Denise Dresser, then OpenAI’s chief revenue officer, said in June that the rate at which users dismiss ads inside ChatGPT has fallen by half since the advertising business launched in February, and the company treats dismissals as its proxy for relevance.
Searchable’s analysis covers a month roughly half a year into that rollout, and across it the share of ads with no connection to the conversation stayed close to a third, with no sign of improvement as ad volume grew.
For brands, the consequence is that a placement inside an assistant is not a substitute for being the answer. An ad that lands in the wrong conversation is likely to be scrolled past, while the recommendation inside the response has already been shown to convert higher than other organic channels.
