Study: ChatGPT Ad Visits Earn 64% Less Than Google Search Ads
The authors value a ChatGPT click at about $0.26, while the largest known account paid $1.72.
A visit from a ChatGPT ad brought in $0.89 in revenue in U.S. traffic, against $2.45 for a paid Google Search visit. That’s a 64% shortfall.
The numbers come from a working paper that tracked shops through OpenAI’s country-by-country ad launch, with the EU, where ads only began after the data ended, as the comparison.
Maximilian Kaiser and Christian Schulze, at business schools in Vienna and Frankfurt, wrote it.
Their working paper is a first version. It’s still under review.
What the study found
So how big is the gap? ChatGPT ad visits converted at 0.37%, against 1.17% for paid search, Search Engine Journal reports.
The paid figures come from 102 advertiser sites. All had full sales tracking.
The spread is the part I’d check first, because your own results could land anywhere in it:
- 87 advertisers bought both ChatGPT ads and paid search in U.S. traffic, and 84 of them earned less revenue per ChatGPT ad visit.
- 73 got zero sales from ChatGPT ads, across 18,726 visits.
- The other 14 made all 570 ChatGPT ad purchases.
- One advertiser alone made 66% of those purchases, and taking that one account out of the numbers makes both the conversion gap and the revenue gap wider.
What a ChatGPT click is worth to you
The authors work out a “parity price”, which is the cost per click at which a ChatGPT ad would return exactly as much revenue for every dollar you spend as a paid search click does.
They start from a median search click of $0.72, from 16 accounts with at least 80% U.S. search traffic. That gives a parity price of about $0.26 per ChatGPT click.
The range is wide. One advertiser drove 76% of U.S. paid ChatGPT revenue, so resampling put it anywhere from $0.05 to $0.57.
What are advertisers really paying? Here’s how that compares:
- $1.72 per click: the largest publicly known account, over 15 days of spend, as reported by Opascope. That’s more than six times the parity price.
- $3 to $5: the maximum bid OpenAI’s basics page suggests you start CPC campaigns at.
Organic ChatGPT traffic dipped too
The paper also checked whether ads made ChatGPT less useful, and used unpaid referrals to 1,898 shops (the kind of ChatGPT traffic your site gets for free) as its stand-in for that.
Organic ChatGPT referrals fell an estimated 5.9% over 13 weeks, compared with the EU, where no ads ran. But that range runs from -12.6% to +1.2%, so it includes no change.
Adjusted for faster ChatGPT adoption in North America, the estimated drop is 7.2% to 8.4%.
For the visitors who still arrived, conversion barely moved from its 2.21% pre-launch rate.
The limits
Can you trust it? I’d want you to know these caveats before you quote the paper to your boss, your client or anyone else who signs off on your ad budget:
- It’s observational: the advertisers chose to buy ChatGPT ads themselves, so the paper shows what happened to them and can’t prove that the ads caused their results.
- It’s last-click data, so it doesn’t see the prompts people typed, the ad impressions, or any later purchase the last click doesn’t capture.
- Kaiser advises Grips Intelligence, which gave the data free (the paper says Grips had no role).
- Before launch, four of the five rollout groups failed the authors’ pre-trend test on their own.
The data stops Aug. 22. Meanwhile, OpenAI has taken ChatGPT Ads to 89 countries and says more than 100,000 advertisers have run campaigns.
That said, you’ll find kinder reports, on different measures.
OpenAI reported that one ecommerce advertiser saw a 3x return on ad spend over 28 days, but you can’t set that beside your revenue per ChatGPT ad visit.
DoubleVerify put Weight Watchers’ cost per acquisition 15.3% below its benchmark.
Why it matters
If you run an online shop and you’re paying for ChatGPT Ads, don’t judge them on the dashboard alone. Work out your own parity price per ChatGPT click. Three steps:
- Divide your revenue per ChatGPT ad visit by your paid search revenue per visit.
- Multiply that by your search cost per click.
- Compare the result with what you pay per ChatGPT click.
Filter out ad-review crawler visits first. OpenAI says they can hit your landing pages with tracking parameters, and your analytics may count them as paid.
Check your ChatGPT Ads rewrite setting too. It’s on by default.
My read: it’s one data provider, and much rests on one advertiser. I’d treat it as a warning.
Still, at $1.72 for a click with a parity price of about $0.26, I’d keep your budget small.
Common Questions
How much less do ChatGPT ads earn per visit than Google Search ads?
About 64% less in U.S. traffic, according to a working paper by Maximilian Kaiser and Christian Schulze. A ChatGPT ad visit brought in $0.89 in revenue, against $2.45 for a paid Google Search visit.
What is the parity price for a ChatGPT ad click?
Roughly $0.26. That’s the cost per click at which a ChatGPT ad would return as much revenue per ad dollar as paid search, with a resampled range of $0.05 to $0.57.
Did ChatGPT ads reduce organic ChatGPT referrals to websites?
Slightly, by the study’s estimate. Unpaid ChatGPT referrals to 1,898 online shops fell about 6% to 8% in the first 13 weeks after ads launched, while the conversion rate of those visits didn’t change.
