July Marketing updates
ChatGPT ADS + Get your business showing up in AI platforms.
You can now advertise in ChatGPT and Google admitted that the AI answer at the top of the search results is now the whole ballgame for a huge chunk of queries.
If you run a business and neither of those sentences meant much to you, that’s fair. You’ve got a business to run. You’re good at what you do. That’s what we’re here for.
If you’re seriously wondering where your marketing dollars should go for the next 12 months, you need to understand the importance of AI.
Not because AI is ’taking our jobs’ and will one day rule the world”
But because two very specific, very practical opportunities just opened up, and most of your competitors haven’t clocked either one yet.
ChatGPT Ads are live in NZ
ChatGPT Ads went live in New Zealand, Australia and Canada in April, and I’ve been in the Ads Manager myself setting up a campaign for our own agency.
The overview:
The minimum daily budget is $25. You can currently optimise for clicks or reach (conversion optimisation is listed as “coming soon,” so if you’re chasing leads and sales directly through the platform’s own optimisation, that’s not quite here … yet).
Ads sit in a clearly labelled, subtly shaded box underneath ChatGPT’s response, and OpenAI is firm that they don’t influence what the AI actually tells the user.
Targeting is contextual rather than the cookie-based retargeting you’re used to from, for example, Meta: it’s matched to what someone is actively discussing in that conversation, plus context hints you provide describing the kinds of conversations your business is relevant to.
My 2 cents:
Budget: A $25 daily minimum is a relatively low bar to test a brand-new channel.
Results: Early click-through data across the platform is still sitting under 1%, which sounds rough until you remember every new ad platform starts messy while the algorithm learns. Early Facebook ads were a bloodbath too. No conversion optimisation yet means this is a top-of-funnel play right now, not a direct-response one: think brand visibility and getting in front of people while they’re actively researching, not a hard sell.
Recommendations:
- Sign up directly at ads.openai.com and have a play. We’re in the process of training and learning how they work as well so sing out if you get stuck. While we don’t claim to be experts yet we will be soon!
- Write your context hints like you’re describing a real conversation, not stuffing in keywords. “Struggling to get results from Facebook ads” works. “Marketing” on its own doesn’t.
- Set expectations around clicks and reach, not conversions, until OpenAI ships that optimisation. Track your own attribution in the meantime.
- Start small and specific. One ad group, a handful of well-chosen context hints, a modest daily spend, and watch what happens before you scale.
This channel could very well replace Google and Social ads so get prepared for that. But being early on a platform with billions of daily conversations and comparatively little competition for attention, at a $25/day entry point? That’s the kind of window that doesn’t stay open for long.
Meanwhile, "ranking on Google" isn't what it used to mean
While everyone’s been distracted by ChatGPT ads, the ground has shifted under organic search too, and this one affects every single client we work with, whether they run ads or not.
Google’s own search team has said the quiet part out loud: their AI Overviews are built on the same core ranking systems as regular search, using retrieval-augmented generation to pull from indexed pages and “query fan-out” to break your one question into several related searches behind the scenes. Their official line is that good SEO is still good SEO. I mostly agree with that. But “mostly” is doing some work in that sentence.
Here’s the bit that should actually change …
How you think about content: research on which pages get cited inside AI answers found that pages sitting at position 21 or lower in traditional Google results still got cited by ChatGPT almost 90% of the time. Separately, other research on AI-cited sources found the overlap between top-ranking Google pages and the sources AI engines actually cite dropped from around 70% down to under 20%.
Ranking #1 on Google and getting chosen by an AI answer are becoming two different games. You can win one and lose the other.
Why? AI systems aren’t ranking pages, they’re selecting, summarising and stitching together an answer from whichever sources are clearest, most specific, and easiest to extract a direct answer from. Keyword density and backlink volume matter less than whether your content actually answers the exact question being asked, in a format the model can lift cleanly.
What you can do:
- Lead with the answer. Put the direct, plain-English answer to the question in the first sentence or two under each heading, then explain your reasoning after. AI systems (and impatient humans) grab the top of the section.
- Structure like you mean it. Clear H2/H3 headings phrased as actual questions, short paragraphs, bullet points and tables where they genuinely help. This isn’t dumbing content down, it’s making it extractable.
- Stop publishing one-off posts and start building topic clusters. A single brilliant blog post on “AI SEO” won’t cut it if the rest of your site never mentions the topic again. AI systems trust sites that clearly own a subject.
- Check your robots.txt. This is the one everyone forgets. If you’re on Cloudflare, its default settings have blocked AI crawlers for plenty of sites without the owner realising. You could be doing everything else right and still be invisible because a bot can’t get in the door.
- Keep it fresh and specific. Generic, thin, AI-generated filler content is the fastest way to get ignored by the very AI systems you’re trying to get cited by. Original insight, real numbers, real examples: that’s what gets lifted into an answer.
None of this replaces solid, human-first SEO. Real expertise, genuinely useful content and a fast, crawlable, well-structured website were always the foundation, and they still are. What’s changed is the finish line. It’s no longer just about the blue link. It’s about whether the AI answering someone’s question decides your business is the one worth mentioning.
The takeaway
ChatGPT ads and AI SEO are two sides of the same coin: attention is moving inside AI conversations, whether that’s a sponsored placement or an organic citation. The businesses that treat this as “something to figure out eventually” are going to spend 2027 trying to catch up to the ones who started testing now, while the field is still relatively uncrowded and the entry point is a $25 daily budget.
You don’t need to overhaul everything by Friday. You need to pick one thing from each list above and actually do it this month. That’s how every channel shift I’ve watched in 15 years of doing this has played out: the early, unglamorous, slightly imperfect action beats the perfectly planned strategy that never launches.
If you want a hand figuring out where to start, that’s literally what we’re here for. Get in touch and let’s build you a plan that doesn’t involve guessing.
Ashleigh x
Published on 08 July 2026 by Ashleigh Rushton
FAQs
$25 per day. You can currently optimise for clicks or reach; conversion optimisation isn’t available yet.
Yes. ChatGPT Ads went live in New Zealand, Australia and Canada from April 2026, with a $25/day minimum budget.
Not necessarily. Studies show the overlap between top Google rankings and AI-cited sources has dropped sharply – pages ranking well outside the top 20 are still frequently cited by AI tools if the content directly answers the question.
Check your robots.txt and Cloudflare settings first – a common default blocks AI crawlers entirely, meaning the bot can’t access your site regardless of how good the content is.
No. OpenAI states ads are clearly labelled and separate from the AI’s actual response, with no influence on what it says.
It’s contextual rather than cookie-based. Ads are matched to what someone is actively discussing in their conversation, plus context hints you provide describing which conversations your business is relevant to.
Content that leads with a direct, plain-English answer, uses clear question-based headings, and covers a topic in depth across multiple pages rather than a single isolated post. Original insight and specific numbers get lifted; generic filler gets ignored.
Not yet. Conversion optimisation is listed as “coming soon” – for now it’s best treated as a brand visibility channel, with your own attribution tracking to measure results.