ChatGPT's Ad Business Is Accelerating Fast — With Bigger Brands and Double the Exposure

OpenAI is ramping up advertising inside ChatGPT at a striking pace. Mobile app users saw roughly twice as many ads per hour in July compared to April, according to Sensor Tower data. The number of advertisers on the platform has nearly tripled in the same period — jumping from around 300 in April to more than 820 in July, with at least 160 of those joining in July alone.

The advertiser mix is shifting meaningfully upmarket. Where niche tech companies like Speechify and Jotform dominated ChatGPT's top ad slots in April, major mainstream brands have taken over: Booking Holdings, Intuit, Home Depot, and L.L.Bean all cracked the top 10 in July. Sports retailer Scheels was the only brand to hold a top-10 spot in both months. Sensor Tower notes that retail remains ChatGPT's biggest sector by ad spend, even as its share of the total pie shrinks.

Financial services is the fastest-growing ad category on the platform, surging from just 2% of ad spend in April to 12% in July — now the third-largest sector behind shopping and software. Travel and tourism and jobs and education are also claiming larger shares. Companies like Expedia, GetYourGuide Deutschland, and BestMoney.com are among July's top spenders alongside recruiting firm Talent Inc. and retailer Quince.

Despite the momentum, OpenAI's ad business is still embryonic. The company reported $100 million in annualized recurring ad revenue as of May — a figure that looks modest against Google's $81.6 billion and Meta's $59.3 billion in ad revenue from their most recent fiscal quarters. Ads appear only beneath AI responses and are excluded from queries touching personal health or politics. The self-serve ad product, launched in May, is widely considered rudimentary compared to the targeting and measurement tools Google and Meta offer. Still, with Sensor Tower estimating ChatGPT hit 1 billion monthly users in May — and the vast majority on free or low-cost plans — OpenAI is sitting on an enormous audience it is only beginning to monetize.