ChatGPT ad visits earned about a third of Google search ad visits

On the 102 sites that tracked every sale, 1.17 per cent of paid search visits ended in an order, against 0.37 per cent of ChatGPT ad visits. Seventy-three advertisers made no sale from 18,726 ChatGPT ad visits between them, and 84 of the 87 that ran both kinds of ad in the US earned less per ChatGPT visit.

Priced at Google’s rate of return, a ChatGPT click would be worth about $0.26, the authors work out, with a range of $0.05 to $0.57 because one advertiser brought in most of the sales. The largest publicly known account paid $1.72 per click over 15 days of spend, as reported by Opascope, an agency that runs paid media for clients. Grips Intelligence, which Kaiser advises, supplied the sales data free.

The paper’s data does not record which ChatGPT plan a visitor was on; when we read chatgpt.com on 31 October, the Go plan card said it “may include ads”, and its US price did not show because prices render by region (our price sheet).

Since the paper’s data stops on 22 August, cannot see which plan a visitor used and leans on one advertiser for 66 per cent of purchases, its $0.26 break-even price comes with a $0.05 to $0.57 range, all of it well below the $1.72 per click one account paid.