ChatGPT turned three years old the other day, which means we’ve spent three years in an AI frenzy.
It also means hundreds of millions of people have been using ChatGPT for years and … not seeing any ads at all, whether they’re using the paid version or the free one.
That’s not totally astonishing: We’ve gotten used to consumer internet products like Google, Facebook, and Instagram taking off without ads for a few years. And then, the deluge.
So how much longer will ChatGPT remain ad-free? And what happens when it isn’t?
Over the weekend, we got a hint that an ad push may be underway, via some code from ChatGPT’s Android app unearthed by developer Tibor Blaho:
ChatGPT Android app 1.2025.329 beta includes new references to an “ads feature” with “bazaar content”, “search ad” and “search ads carousel” pic.twitter.com/BdHOJIQHmA
— Tibor Blaho (@btibor91) November 29, 2025
Scouring apps for yet-to-be-released features is a long-standing tech hobby, and sometimes it really does yield results. It’s also entirely possible that what Blaho found is … something other than an ad product road map.
But it still seems very, very likely that ChatGPT will have ads at some point.
We know this in part because OpenAI executives, starting with Sam Altman, have suggested they will be coming (in 2024, Altman said ads were gross; this year, he allowed that maybe OpenAI could make “some cool ad product”).
We know it because OpenAI has been stocking itself with talent from Meta — one of the most successful advertising companies in the world.
And we know it because it’s simply logical: Altman says ChatGPT has around 800 million weekly users, and only a small percentage of them pay. At some point, his company will want to convert those non-paying users into revenue-generating ones, and ads are the obvious way to do that.
Meanwhile, The Information reports, OpenAI focus groups show that some ChatGPT users already assume ads play a role in the results they’re seeing. (I’ve asked OpenAI for comment; while we’re here, I’ll note that OpenAI has a business partnership with Axel Springer, which owns Business Insider.)
But all of that is different from saying ads are coming soon, or knowing what kind of ads OpenAI would want to put into ChatGPT. And it certainly doesn’t address the core question about what happens when you inject ads into an answer machine: Does that machine give you the best answers? Or the answers someone has paid to give you?
Which brings us to the next question: If ads do show up, what would they look like? Because sticking ads into an AI assistant isn’t like putting them next to search results or inside a news feed. There’s no feed. There’s just the answer.
There are a few obvious possibilities, none of which are mutually exclusive:
• Search-style intent ads
This is the Google model: You tell Google exactly what you’re looking for — “dumpling spot near me,” “best Chromebook” — and advertisers bid to appear next to those queries. If ChatGPT is now a legitimate Google rival, why not use Google’s business model, too?
• Personalized ads based on everything ChatGPT knows about you
This is the Meta model: Instead of bidding on queries, advertisers target people, based on what it has learned about their behavior, on and off Meta’s properties.
• Old-school text links
The simplest version: “You asked for the best toaster, here are three recommendations, one of which is sponsored.” That’s basically affiliate marketing. It’s low-key and probably the least lucrative.
• Multimedia ads
You are probably typing things into ChatGPT and reading its results. But it doesn’t have to work like that: ChatGPT can already talk and show you images. Via Sora, it can show you video. The magic device famed designer Jony Ive is building for the service likely won’t have any screen at all. All of which means that Altman and Co. may have a choice to serve you ads that aren’t tiny boxes of text on your phone.
But no matter what route OpenAI takes, all of its ad plans will have the same peril: the possibility that injecting paid messages in a service you count on could change your relationship with that service, and weaken that trust.
It’s a gnarly problem, even for a company that’s used to moving quickly and fixing messes after the fact. They might move more slowly on this one than some people think.
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