I Asked ChatGPT 500 Questions. Here Are the Ads I Saw Most Often
Ads are rolling out across the US on ChatGPT’s free tier. I asked OpenAI's bot 500 questions to see what these ads were like and how they related to my prompts.
OpenAI is starting to stuff the free version of ChatGPT with ads. So, I spent this week asking ChatGPT 500 questions on the mobile app to get a sense of how these new ads look as they roll out to more users in the US. My questions were loosely based on how OpenAI says people use its generative AI tool, like for seeking information or requesting practical guidance.
In my rough tests, the ChatGPT ads felt quite frequent. About one out of every five questions in a new conversation thread triggered an ad at the bottom of the chatbot’s output. These ads always included a website link as a button and were tailored to the general topic of my question. As OpenAI continues to experiment with ads in ChatGPT, the formatting and the frequency of these ads may change.
“Because ChatGPT is a trusted and personal environment for many people, we’re intentionally rolling ads out slowly,” an OpenAI spokesperson tells WIRED. “Starting with a limited number of advertisers and formats while we iterate based on what we learn.” OpenAI claims the decision to roll out ads now is not tied to any rumored IPO later this year, but rather part of a long-term strategy to keep ChatGPT broadly accessible.
Overall, I saw ads for dog food, printers, hotel reservations, productivity software , movie tickets, food delivery apps, fashionable ties, streaming services, corporate credit cards, apartment furniture, cruise vacations, AI coding tools , freelance editors, skin-care articles, business internet plans, handmade gifts, grocery stores, and basketball tickets, among others.
Questions related to travel currently seem to trigger ads the most often. When I asked for help planning a trip to Palm Springs, the ad attached to the bottom of the answer was for Booking.com. When I clicked on the link, it automatically searched for hotel deals in Palm Springs.
Before this year’s embrace of ads for free users, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had expressed his distaste for chatbots with ads. “I hate ads,” Altman said during an onstage discussion at Harvard Business School in 2024. He said the mixture of “ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling,” and it raised questions about who may be influencing a chatbot’s answers.
