ChatGPT ad clicks earn $0.89 per visit against $2.45 from paid search, working paper finds
A visit from a ChatGPT ad generated $0.89 in revenue for U.S. traffic, compared with $2.45 from a paid Google search ad, according to a working paper by Maximilian Kaiser and Christian Schulze dated October 2026 and still under review. The paid-ad figures cover 102 advertiser sites with full sales tracking.
ChatGPT ad visits converted at 0.37 per cent in U.S. traffic against 1.17 per cent for paid search. Among the 87 advertisers who bought both formats, 84 earned less per ChatGPT ad visit than per search visit, and 73 of them recorded no sales at all from 18,726 ChatGPT ad visits. A single advertiser accounted for 66 per cent of all purchases across the 102 sites.
Using paid search as a benchmark, the authors put the parity price for a ChatGPT click at about $0.26, the level at which both channels would return the same revenue per dollar spent. Resampling put the estimate between $0.05 and $0.57. One account paid $1.72 per click over 15 days, more than six times that figure, while OpenAI recommends starting bids of $3 to $5.
The paper also tracked unpaid referrals to 1,898 sites and estimated that organic ChatGPT referrals fell 6 to 8 per cent after ads launched, relative to organic search referrals and to the EU, where ads did not run until after the data window closed. Conversion among the organic visits that did arrive showed no detectable change. OpenAI says its ads are labelled and kept apart from answers, and that it is exploring more native ways for businesses to appear in ChatGPT.
Advertisers can work out their own parity price by dividing revenue per visit from ChatGPT ads by revenue per visit from paid search, then multiplying by their search cost per click. The authors advise checking ChatGPT ad sessions for ad-review crawler visits, which analytics tools can count as paid.
Reported by Search Engine Journal ↗
Topics: ChatGPT, AI advertising, Measurement