Skip to content
SilktideHelp

Advertising in AI

Some AI assistants now sell advertising. When an ad appears in a response Presence measured, it is recorded - because it was part of what a person asking that question actually saw.

Who shows ads today

This is new, and it will change. At the time of writing:

  • ChatGPT shows ads to people on Free and Go plans. OpenAI sells those placements, and they appear in the ChatGPT website answers Presence measures - the consumer product, not the API. Paid plans typically do not see them. OpenAI's own note is Ads in ChatGPT.
  • Presence only records ads from those ChatGPT website answers. We have no way to capture ads from the other assistants we measure. Most of them do not show ads in their answers today; if that changed, we still would not record them until we could extract them.

A workspace's Ads screen stays empty if ChatGPT has not yet answered a prompt there, or if nobody bid on those questions.

What Presence records

Each ad is stored with the response it appeared in: who paid, the headline and copy, where the click goes, and whether the assistant actually displayed it.

Assistants report ads that were served against a prompt, including ones the interface never painted. Presence keeps both. Ads the person would have seen sit under Ads shown; ads that were bought but not displayed sit in a collapsed ads not shown list. The Ads screen is where those counts add up across a workspace.

An ad is not a citation, and it does not count towards anybody's visibility. Paid placement and being recommended are different things.

Why it is worth watching

If a competitor is buying ads against the questions your customers ask, that is a fact about the workspace, the same way a new source or a new rival in the shortlist is. The Ads screen is the place to watch who is spending, and each response is the place to see what they said when they got there.

Last updated

Was this page helpful?