Brands and agencies who jumped in early have been sharing their numbers, and they're pretty sobering. One advertiser reportedly spent just 3% of a $250,000 budget over several weeks of a live campaign. Not because they pulled it. Because the ads barely ran.
The Reality Check: Early Performance Data
Click-through rates are running at around 0.91% in monitored campaigns, compared to 6.4% on Google Search in equivalent sectors. There's no automated buying yet, so deals are still being done over calls and spreadsheets. On top of that, OpenAI's own Ad Manager has a reporting glitch that's been stopping advertisers from seeing their own campaign data.
There's also a structural issue baked into the product. ChatGPT's paying subscribers (Pro, Plus, Business and Enterprise users) don't see ads at all. So the highest-value, most engaged segment of ChatGPT's audience is completely unreachable through paid placements. That's a significant limitation.
To be fair, this is early days. Every ad platform starts off rough and Google Ads is a good example of that. OpenAI is rolling ads out to all US free-tier users soon, and the product will improve over time. Better targeting, better reporting, more automation. That's a reasonable expectation. But right now you're spending without being able to prove it's working, and that's a difficult conversation to have with a client or a board.
Organic AI Traffic Is Putting Up Numbers Worth Paying Attention To
While the paid side is still finding its feet, there's a parallel story playing out quietly. Brands that have been appearing organically inside AI-generated answers are seeing conversion rates that honestly surprised us when we first looked at them.
Traffic coming in via an AI recommendation converts at around 14.2%, versus 2.8% from Google organic. That's five times higher. And when you think about why, it actually makes a lot of sense.
When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity a question and the AI names your business in the answer, that person hasn't just found you. They've been recommended to you by something they already trust. They arrive with their question answered and their decision half made. Compare that to someone who clicked result number four on a Google search. It's a completely different level of intent.
How to Get into AI Answers: Enter GEO
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimisation. Think of it as the next step on from SEO, but instead of ranking in a list of links you're appearing in the answer itself. It's about making sure AI tools know who you are, understand what you do, and reach for you when a relevant question comes up.
When an LLM generates a response it draws on everything it's been trained on and, increasingly, what it can pull from live trusted sources. The brands that show up in those answers have typically got a few things right. Their content clearly answers real questions. They're cited and mentioned by credible third-party sources. AI tools have a clean and consistent understanding of who they are. And they've built genuine authority in their space over time.
GEO is the work of building all of that deliberately. It compounds over time, it works across every AI platform (Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, not just ChatGPT), and it reaches the paying subscribers that ads can't touch.
The Honest Take
We're not saying don't touch ChatGPT ads. If you have budget for early-stage testing and you want to understand the platform before it matures, there's a case for that. Just treat it as an experiment, not a performance channel. The reporting isn't there yet, the measurement isn't there, and the results so far speak for themselves.
Organic AI visibility on the other hand is already working. The brands putting resource into GEO now are doing what the early SEO winners did a decade ago. Getting into the source material before everyone else realises they should be doing the same.
If you want to know how AI tools are representing your business right now, what they say about you, where you appear and where you don't, that's exactly what we look at.
Want to See How AI Sees Your Brand?
We run GEO audits for UK businesses, showing you exactly how you're represented across AI tools today and what it takes to change that.
Get in touch at pushgroup.co.uk
