The ChatGPT experience has so far been blissfully free of sales patter. There are paid tiers, but the bot never tried to flog you anything. Google Search went the other way and let ads steer buying choices, which trained people to skim past half the page.
Fresh code strings in the ChatGPT Android app show OpenAI drifting towards the same trap. Tibor spotted references to an “ads feature” with “bazaar content”, “search ad” and a “search ads carousel” in the 1.2025.329 beta. The whole thing looks like the same clutter that turned Amazon’s listings into a parade of sponsored tat.
If OpenAI pushes ahead, it could jolt the web economy because the outfit knows far more about users than Google ever did. It sees prompts that reveal what people want, dread and intend to buy. Personalised adverts wedged into that flow would make old-style targeting look prehistoric.
The leak suggests ads will start in the search experience, although anyone who has watched YouTube choke videos with pre-rolls knows this sort of thing rarely stays contained once accountants get the scent of easy cash.
The growth numbers will only harden OpenAI’s resolve. ChatGPT now attracts roughly 800 million weekly users, a leap from one hundred million in November 2023 and about 300 million in late 2024. An OpenAI-backed study figured 700 million users were sending 18 billion messages a week by July 2025. Analysts now reckon the service pulls in about 5 to 6 billion visits each month. ChatGPT handles roughly 2.5 billion prompts a day, and India has overtaken the US as the largest user base.
With traffic like that, the temptation to cram in ads becomes overwhelming even if it risks hollowing out the product. People already moan that YouTube’s intrusive ads wreck music and tutorials, and that Amazon buries genuine results beneath sponsored clutter. OpenAI seems content to stumble down the same road and hope users put up with it.
ChatGPT has the ingredients to make ads lucrative. Whether anyone sticks around once the enshification kicks in is another story.