Paid ads now sit inside ChatGPT’s commercial answers, and the paid layer does not look the same in any two categories. OtterlyAI measured OpenAI’s paid Ads and product Shopping Card appearances across different industries in the United States, then mapped who is buying the slots, how often, and where the advertised brands diverge from the ones ChatGPT recommends.
This report is the industry-by-industry companion to our overview. It walks through all 16 categories in turn, from the most ad-saturated to the least, and names the 50 brands advertising most across ChatGPT. All figures are first-party OtterlyAI data, ChatGPT only, United States, over a 2 week window in July 2026.
Key Findings
- The OtterlyAI Research shows that ChatGPT Ads are already appearing in all industries covered in this study
- 76.4% of the time, asking ChatGPT a shopping question returns an answer with an ad in it. That is about 3 out of every 4 answers.
- Most ad-heavy industry is Finance and Insurance with 85.9% Ads appearances in AI answers. Least ad-heavy industry is Healthcare with 42.3% Ads in AI answers.
- In 12 of 14 industries, the market leader (think Zillow, Uber, Nike) ran zero ChatGPT ads, leaving the ad space to challengers.
- Shopping Card only showed up in 8 of 16 industries: 2.2% of all AI answers
- Top Shopping Card Brand: Walmart, across Consumer Goods, Technology, Media
How We Measured This Industry-Wide Study
We tracked a consistent set of commercial prompts for each of the 16 industries in OtterlyAI, on ChatGPT, in the US market, run daily across a 2 week window in July 2026. We read advertiser and retailer identity directly from the ad and shopping units in each answer, and unwrapped click-trackers to the real advertiser domain.
The headline advertiser metric is Answer %, the share of ChatGPT answers in a brand’s own industry that contained at least one of its ads. For the cross-industry leaderboard, we also use reach, the share of all ad-carrying answers where a brand appeared. All figures are percentages.
ChatGPT Ads: What They Are and What We Observed
ChatGPT ads are paid, clearly labeled placements OpenAI now shows inside ChatGPT’s answers, matched to the conversation. They matter because an ad already appears in about 3 of 4 shopping-related answers, adding a paid layer on top of the organic recommendation. AI visibility is becoming partly pay-to-play, so brands must track who is advertising against their prompts.
How to apply for ChatGPT Ads?
As of July 2026 OpenAI runs a beta self-serve Ads Manager, so you sign up at openai.com/advertisers (or ads.openai.com), get taken into Ads Manager to create an account and a campaign with a budget and goal, and buy on a CPC or CPM basis with no minimum spend (a big change from the roughly $200,000 minimum floated in February 2026), with ads currently live to Free and Go tier users in the US, UK Canada, Australia, & New Zealand.
The Overall Picture: ChatGPT Ads in 76.4% of Answers, Shopping in 2.2%
Every question in this study is a shopping question, the kind where someone is trying to buy something or choose a product or service. Those are the answers where ads show up, so those are the answers we measured.
76.4% of those answers had at least one ad. Put simply: ask ChatGPT what to buy, and about 3 out of 4 times an ad appears. Product Shopping Cards are a different story. They showed up in only 2.2% of answers, and in only 8 of the 16 industries.
How often ads appear swings a lot by industry, from 85.9% of answers in Finance and Insurance down to 42.3% in Healthcare, a gap of more than 40 points. Categories where lots of comparison sites and affiliates compete draw the most advertisers, while regulated or low-spend categories draw the fewest. The chart below ranks all 16.
The Brands Advertising The Most in ChatGPT per Industry
Ranked by reach across all 16 industries, the biggest ChatGPT advertisers are dominated by cross-category performance players: comparison sites, affiliates, and horizontal software vendors that blanket many categories at once. BestMoney advertised in 15 of the 16 industries; LegalZoom did the same, with Monday.com, Forbes, and Top10.com close behind.
| Industry | Answers with an ad | Top advertiser | Top advertiser Answer % | Top Shopping Card Retailer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Finance and Insurance | 85.9% | BestMoney | 31.4% | None |
| Sports Brands | 85.6% | L.L.Bean | 8.4% | Dick’s Sporting Goods |
| Transportation | 85.1% | Shiply | 13.6% | None |
| Real Estate | 84.0% | SoFi | 8.1% | None |
| Industrial and Manufacturing | 83.7% | BestMoney | 5.0% | Home Depot |
| Hospitality | 83.3% | Booking.com | 13.0% | G2A |
| Energy | 82.6% | Angi | 13.7% | Lectron |
| Educational Platforms | 81.6% | O’Reilly | 3.9% | None |
| Retail and E-commerce | 79.2% | GlassesUSA | 3.7% | Walmart |
| Technology | 79.2% | BestMoney | 7.4% | Walmart |
| Consumer Goods | 76.4% | Mattel | 4.0% | Walmart |
| Media and Entertainment | 75.2% | Xfinity | 8.4% | Walmart |
| Government | 71.3% | LegalZoom | 5.4% | None |
| Pharma | 65.8% | Certara | 6.2% | None |
| Nonprofit | 63.1% | Momentive Software | 5.9% | None |
| Healthcare | 42.3% | Expert Market | 2.3% | None |
The Top advertisers are affiliates, not household names
The brands winning ChatGPT ad slots are, in most categories, not the household names. They are affiliate marketplaces, comparison sites, and lead-generation platforms built to buy performance media.
BestMoney, a financial comparison site, set the high mark. It appeared in 31.4% of Finance and Insurance answers, nearly one in three, and took 36.4% of all ad placements in the category. The next tier repeats the pattern: Angi (13.7% of Energy), Shiply (13.6% of Transportation), and Booking.com (13.0% of Hospitality) are all intermediaries that resell or aggregate, not the end brand a user set out to find.
Some direct brands do buy aggressively, usually challengers expanding share rather than incumbents defending it: Robinhood (10.0% of Finance), SoFi (8.1% of Real Estate), and apparel names L.L.Bean (8.4% of Sports) and Alo (7.1%). The consistent signal is that ChatGPT ad inventory rewards advertisers with a performance-media habit.
How the ChatGPT Ad Rate Moved, Day by Day
A single snapshot can mislead, so we tracked the daily ad rate for two weeks, from July 2 to 15, 2026, across all 16 industries. The overall ad rate held between 77% and 82% of answers every day. Ads are not a spike or a test that comes and goes; they are a steady feature of shopping answers. Product Shopping Cards stayed flat and rare over the same two weeks, never rising far above a few percent of answers, so the two surfaces are moving on very different timelines.
Underneath that steady average, individual industries move day to day. Transportation, Real Estate, and Finance sit near the top all fortnight, above 85% of answers. Healthcare stays far lower, around 40 to 48%, with Nonprofit around 60 to 65%. Consumer Goods swings the most, from 86% down to 68% on a single day.
ChatGPT Ads in B2C
ChatGPT Ads in B2B
ChatGPT Ads in Public & Regulated Sectors
Shopping Cards: What They Are and What We Observed
Shopping Cards are the second surface, and they behave differently from ads.
What a Shopping Card is
A Shopping Card is a product listing inside the answer that shows a title, price, rating, and a link to the retailer. Ads are paid and labeled Sponsored. Shopping Cards, by contrast, are currently organic and unsponsored, ranked on relevance, according to OpenAI’s description of its shopping results (OpenAI, “Buy it in ChatGPT”).
| Attribute | ChatGPT Ads | ChatGPT Shopping Cards |
|---|---|---|
| Paid or organic | Paid placement | Organic today |
| Label | Sponsored, separated from the answer | Product listing, no Sponsored label |
| What it shows | An advertiser message and link | Product title, price, rating, retailer link |
| Who is attributed | The advertiser that bought the slot | The retailer or brand selling the product |
| How you get in | OpenAI advertiser sign-up and self-serve Ads Manager, contextually targeted | Product feed via the ChatGPT Merchant Program and a healthy Google Merchant Center feed |
| Current cost | CPC or CPM ad spend | No media cost today |
How Shopping Cards are earned
There are two levers.
- First, the ChatGPT Merchant Program: merchants apply at chatgpt.com/merchants to submit a product feed, and OpenAI states that Shopify and Etsy catalogs are integrated automatically, with the program currently live in the United States.
- Second, the Google Shopping feed. Independent analysis found that the large majority of ChatGPT product results match organic Google Shopping listings, so a healthy Google Merchant Center feed is the strongest lever a retailer has. These mechanics are current as of July 2026 and are changing quickly.
The benefits
A Shopping Card reaches the user at high purchase intent, at the decision moment, with a short list of a few products rather than a full results page. It links straight to the retailer, and it currently requires no ad spend.
How to earn placement
Treat it as product-data hygiene. Keep complete, current product data using schema.org/Product markup. Maintain accurate price and availability. Refresh the feed often. Build review signals. Keep product pages crawlable. Apply to the merchant program where it fits your catalog. OpenAI’s product feed specification rewards data completeness, pricing transparency, and review signals (OpenAI Product Feed Specification, developers.openai.com).
What OtterlyAI observed with Shopping Cards: Rare, Concentrated in Physical Goods
Shopping Cards are the second surface, and they are far less common than ads. They appeared in 2.2% of answers overall and in only 8 of the 16 industries, all of them physical-product categories. Ads are paid and labeled Sponsored; Shopping Cards are currently organic and unsponsored, ranked on relevance, according to OpenAI’s description of its shopping results.
Consumer Goods (15.7%) and Sports Brands (10.4%) carry the most cards, and big-box retailers win them: Walmart led the cards in Consumer Goods, Technology, and Media, with Target, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and Best Buy also recurring. Retailers, not manufacturers, own this surface today.
One caveat applies across all of these categories: the paid and organic line is blurring. OpenAI has begun letting retailers run paid product ads from the same catalog feed that powers organic cards, so a single feed can serve both surfaces. Shopping Cards are organic today, but that is a current state, not a permanent one.
| Retailer | Industry | Share of Shopping Cards | Example product |
|---|---|---|---|
| Walmart | Consumer Goods | 29.8% | Tide Free and Gentle |
| Target | Consumer Goods | 18.6% | Essentia Water |
| Dick’s Sporting Goods | Sports Brands | 16.5% | HOKA Clifton 10 |
| Walmart | Technology | 16.3% | HyperX Cloud III |
| Home Depot | Industrial and Manufacturing | 80.0% | Milwaukee M18 FUEL Combo Kit |
| Lectron | Energy | 13.3% | Lectron V-BOX Pro |
| Walmart | Media and Entertainment | 71.4% | Onn. 4K Pro Streaming Device |
What this means for marketing teams
GEO is no longer only an SEO job. The paid layer brings PPC and performance marketing teams into AI Search, next to the SEO, PR and content teams who owned GEO first. ChatGPT ads are still early, with limited analytics and few performance optimization controls, so the near-term work is monitoring and positioning, not bid tuning.
Apply early for the ChatGPT Merchants Program, currently ChatGPT Ads is happening only in the US which will soon be rolled out to the rest of the world.
Decide per category, not per brand. In saturated categories like Finance, Transportation, and Real Estate, plan to compete for the paid slot. In light categories like Health and Nonprofit, invest first in earning the recommendation.
Choose your surface. In physical-product categories with real Shopping Card presence, such as Consumer Goods, Sports, and Technology, earned product cards are a second route to visibility (currently non-paid). In service categories with no cards, ads and the recommendation are the only two surfaces that exist.
Watch the challengers, not only the leaders. The brands buying your category’s slots are often comparison sites and challengers. Track their Answer % over time, because steady paid presence compounds into familiarity.
Structure product data once, serve both surfaces. A clean, complete, frequently refreshed product feed now powers organic Shopping Cards and paid product ads. Building it well is a single investment with two returns.
Measure AI answer visibility as its own metric. The recommendation and the ad slot are separate surfaces, and a brand can win one and lose the other. Track both, by category, on a schedule, the way you already track search rankings.
Conclusion
The paid ads layer in AI Search is arriving unevenly. In some categories, ChatGPT already shows an ad in more than four of every five commercial answers, and the brands buying those slots are usually challengers and intermediaries rather than the leaders the answer recommends. In others, visibility is still earned, and Shopping Cards remain a smaller, mostly organic surface concentrated in physical-product categories.
The single mistake to avoid is assuming your category looks like the average. It does not. Finance and Healthcare sit more than 40 points apart. Measure your own category, on both surfaces, before deciding whether AI visibility is safe or already contested.
What Comes Next: Track ChatGPT Ads for Your Own Brand
This study is one snapshot of a fast-moving surface. The paid layer of ChatGPT is expanding month to month, and the brands buying your category’s slots will keep changing. OtterlyAI now tracks ChatGPT Ads and Shopping Cards inside every brand report, free on all plans, so you can see who is advertising against your own prompts, how often, and with what claims and links. See the feature announcement: ChatGPT Ads & Shopping Tracking in OtterlyAI.
Got a GEO experiment idea? Let’s collaborate
At OtterlyAI, we don’t write about AI Search from the sidelines. We measure it. We run and update a public GEO Experimentation Tracker showing what we are testing and what moved AI Search. If you are running your own GEO experiment, email rick.tousseyn@otterly.ai and we may feature it with your name attributed.
👉 See who is buying ChatGPT ads against your prompts. ChatGPT Ad and Shopping tracking is live inside every OtterlyAI brand report, free on all plans: get started with OtterlyAI
👉 Want to measure your AI Visibility? Start with OtterlyAI and our GEO Guide.
👉 Learn how to connect your Claude or ChatGPT to OtterlyAI’s MCP.
