The adoption of AI tools is giving both consumers and business buyers a new way to find products and services. Answers from numerous sources can now be synthesised and processed in seconds, before being reproduced as a direct, concise and structured answer. This has created the need for a new marketing discipline, geared towards making sure that brands will show up in this new channel for discovery.
With this in mind, businesses must focus on cultivating a strong, stable and trustworthy reputation that AI tools will use in conversational responses. However, ChatGPT’s move to test ads for its Free and Go users in the US raises some big questions around the potential commercialisation of these tools.
Will marketers start to believe they can simply pay their way into AI answers? And without trust, transparency, and verified customer reviews to back them up, will these ads drive sales?
What we know about how ChatGPT ads will work
While we are still waiting to see how the system matures, it seems unlikely that an ad presence alone on ChatGPT – without quality organic citations – will drive brand trust or customer conversion. Instead, genuine signals of trust, such as customer reviews, are likely to become even more critical in helping brands to stand out.
Firstly, not all users will be served ads, so organic results will still matter when the target audience are more likely to be paying subscribers. Even though Open AI predicts only 8.5% of weekly users will be paying customers by 2030, these users are likely to include valued audiences like individual professionals and business accounts. Similarly, ChatGPT will prioritise ads that support the conversation rather than disrupt it – meaning that building relevance will still be key.
Finally, ads will not be folded into the tool’s organic answer and will instead be labelled and positioned underneath this. The user reaction is likely to be just as discerning about paid placements within AI tools as they are with paid search results. This means trust signals will still need to be present throughout the buying journey to drive consumer confidence and ultimately, purchase conversion.
What does this mean for trust?
The upshot is that marketers still need to focus on being visible and trustworthy in AI results. Even if brands do buy ad placements in ChatGPT, they will be much more credible and are likely to convert better when backed by organic citations in the answers. With this in mind, it’s more crucial than ever for brands to bolster their appearances in authoritative sources with large volumes of data-rich content, through methods such as encouraging their customers to leave reviews on platforms.
Ultimately, marketers will most likely see a familiar dynamic emerge which is similar to today’s best practice in search engine optimisation. Optimisation will probably focus on both ‘owning the answer’ and owning the ad. For smaller and bigger businesses alike, this reiterates the importance of establishing a strong sense of authority that AI tools will pick up on and then present in their answers.
While ChatGPT ads will allow brands to buy space as in any other form of advertising, they won’t let marketers buy authority that their business hasn’t earned. Consumers don’t view ads in a vacuum, and with OpenAI confirming that ads will not influence the conversational responses they sit next to. This creates a danger of reputational dissonance for brands if an ad’s claims don’t match what ChatGPT serves up about them. Even in the long term brands can prevent their ads being shown next to negative information about their brand, then this could drastically reduce the opportunities to reach a target audience.
How can brands win?
Overall, if brands are to build strong reputations and bolster their chances of strong AI visibility,, they’ll need to remember three ‘R’s.
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Relevance: Improving brand relevance is paramount in the context of AI Search as it’s a technical requirement for visibility. Tools like ChatGPT prioritise information found in authoritative sources – so if an AI doesn’t perceive a brand as being highly relevant for a specific topic, it is much less likely to be included in answers. Content needs to be phrased in the form of answers to questions – not stuffed with keywords.
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Ranking: In ChatGPT, ranking is less about ‘blue links’ and is more about being an entity that the AI trusts. Brands are more likely to be mentioned if information about it is backed by sources with high domain authority. AI models pull information from a variety of online visible sources, such as Wikipedia, Reddit, and online media outlets. Remember that internal content and metrics – like internal customer satisfaction surveys or your closed company intranet – are invisible to AI systems, so won’t influence results.
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Recency: AI systems prefer fresh content, so sites populated with user-generated content can be a particularly powerful source. For example, Wikipedia adds 500 new articles every day. More broadly, marketers should aim to keep their online content as up to date as possible – whether this is maintaining website content, or refreshing profiles elsewhere.
Marketers can also improve their chances of increasing their AI visibility by optimising their content to fit what models like. For example, AI models often tend to pull content in the form of checklists, comparison tables, and pros versus cons. With this in mind, it’s crucial to make sure that the formats and locations where content is stored are machine readable, so you know they are designed to be ‘read’ by AI tools. With content well optimised for AI systems, brands are more likely to be included in responses even if a competitor buys the ad space below.
