Go Fish Digital and OpenAI separate paid from earned visibility in ChatGPT
Go Fish Digital and OpenAI ran an on-demand webinar on how paid placements and organic recommendations work side by side inside ChatGPT. Abhilash Edathil, who works on OpenAI's monetization team, showed a travel-planning conversation where an ad appeared alongside the organic answer, drawing on the conversation's context and, with user permission, personalisation. He said ads do not inform the answer itself.
AJ of Go Fish Digital framed an answer's brand recommendation as earned visibility and a labelled ad as paid visibility, arguing that two different brands appearing in those positions is not a contradiction. A paid test can put an offer in front of someone mid-conversation, but it does not buy inclusion in the model's answer, and an earned mention is not an ad impression or proof of a click.
On measurement, AJ said a single prompt response is too variable to act like a traditional rank position. He suggested starting with 20 to 40 real customer questions, running them repeatedly over one to two weeks with the same model and settings, and looking for recurring gaps rather than treating one answer as a verdict. Patrick Algrim added that brands should judge the quality of a recommendation, not just count mentions.
Both speakers said to fix the company website first. Algrim used a moving-company example: a firm offering cross-country moves that never says so on its site, and has no corroborating evidence elsewhere, should not assume an AI system will infer the service. AJ added a technical check that relevant pages must be reachable by search crawlers rather than blocked by robots rules or a CDN.
Edathil said ChatGPT ads were shown to eligible adults on the Free and Go versions, not paid tiers, with availability by market and vertical still evolving. He pointed advertisers to OpenAI's ads manager to check eligibility and start a test, and recommended picking the desired outcome first, connecting conversion data through the available pixel or API, and adjusting creative, bids or budgets from results. AJ warned that AI influence can vanish from last-click reporting, so GA4's AI-assistant referrals show only part of the journey and should be supplemented with customer self-reporting and branded and direct traffic trends.
Reported by Search Engine Journal ↗
Topics: ChatGPT, Measurement, AI advertising
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