Similarweb and Graphite on September 28, 2026 released "The State of ChatGPT Ads", a 32-slide report that pairs Similarweb's user-panel data on ads in nine live ChatGPT markets with Graphite's analysis of more than 98,000 ads and 8,000 landing pages. According to the report, worldwide weekly click-through rate has risen 112% across a series that begins on March 30, and 43.4% of ad-eligible US users had seen at least one ad as of September 2026.

In Short

Two research firms looked at who sees ads inside ChatGPT, how often people click them and which companies buy them, and reported on September 28, 2026 that the click rate has more than doubled since spring. That matters because outside data on ChatGPT ads is scarce, yet the figures here come from companies that sell related products and show percentages rather than totals. In practice, the report points to more clicks for ads placed early in a conversation and to a buyer pool in which many advertisers appear for a few weeks and then vanish.

What the report measures

The 32-slide report has three parts: Market, Creative and a ten-step Playbook. Similarweb supplies reach, impression-share, click-through rate and turn-position data from its user panel, worldwide and for the nine markets it counts as live, current to September 2026 unless a slide says otherwise. It "discloses percentages and shares only; panel volumes are not disclosed", the methodology slide states.

Graphite, which describes itself as "a research-driven growth agency", supplies the ad-level material. According to Graphite, that comprises more than 95,000 ChatGPT ads from over 500 US advertisers collected between April 1 and August 16, 2026, with more than 70,000 distinct creatives. It crawled more than 8,000 landing pages and classified them from page content at 84.7% accuracy against blind human labels, and sorted more than 9,000 of the top 10,000 US advertisers into a taxonomy that, according to Graphite, covers 98.95% of US impressions. For ten advertisers on ChatGPT, Meta and Google Search at once, it also pulled the Meta Ad Library and the Google Ads Transparency Center.

Two coverage notes limit what the data can say. Cross-channel CTR comparisons stop at paid search, because Similarweb "does not yet have comparable CTR data for paid social, YouTube, or display on this panel." And the findings on what an exchange looks like before an ad appears are described as "early and directional".

Several details inside the package do not agree with one another or with outside records. The summary and collaboration slides cite 98,000+ ads; the methodology slide lists 95k+ for the US collection, without explanation. The summary slide also says ChatGPT "officially launched ads in March 2026". PPC Land recorded that the US pilot began on February 9, 2026, at a $60 CPM with a $200,000 minimum commitment, and the deck's weekly CTR series starts on March 30, seven weeks later, so the 112% rise describes late March onwards. The same slide says the business reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate within its "first 200 days after launch"; PPC Land counted August 31, when OpenAI made the claim, as the 203rd day after February 9.

Reach and click rate across nine markets

Similarweb measures reach as the share of eligible ChatGPT users who saw at least one ad. The deck does not define "ad-eligible", but ads are limited to Free and Go subscribers, as OpenAI said when it confirmed testing on January 16. In September 2026 the figure stood at 43.4% in the United States, below the United Kingdom's 45.7% and just above Australia's 43.3%. Mexico, at 27.8%, was lowest.

MarketAd-eligible reach, September 2026All-time CTR, March 30 to September 16
United Kingdom45.7%0.74%
United States43.4%0.73%
Australia43.3%0.67%
Canada42.9%0.75%
New Zealand40.9%0.60%
Japan35.9%1.53%
Brazil34.9%1.91%
South Korea32.9%1.21%
Mexico27.8%1.55%

Source: Similarweb, as published in the Graphite and Similarweb report.

The reach measure differs from the 26% of ChatGPT responses carrying an ad that Similarweb put in its August 17 AI Ads release, which counts responses rather than users and which PPC Land traced to a US desktop measurement for June. Adthena, a separate vendor, counted zero UK ChatGPT ad items in 169,560 scrapes for June, a result PPC Land noted conflicted with other pages of Adthena's own report; the datasets cover different months and methods.

Click-through rate is the headline metric. The deck's weekly chart of worldwide CTR runs from the week of March 30 to the week of September 14 under the label "CTR Has Increased +112% Worldwide". Read from the bars, the series opens near 0.4%, reaches 1.1% to 1.3% across much of late June and July, slips to 0.8% to 0.9% through August, then returns to about 1.2% before ending near 1.0%. The first and last bars alone imply a larger rise than 112%, which points to a trend-line or smoothed calculation; the deck prints no weekly values and does not describe its method. Similarweb's earlier release recorded a 0.50% click-through rate for US desktop chats in June, against 0.73% for the US across the whole period in the new deck; the scopes differ, and the deck does not reconcile them.

By market, Brazil leads on all-time CTR at 1.91%, ahead of Mexico at 1.55% and Japan at 1.53%, against 0.60% to 0.75% in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The windows are uneven. PPC Land recorded Brazil and Mexico going live on August 17, Japan and South Korea on June 22 and the United Kingdom on June 6, so the "all-time" figures for Brazil and Mexico rest on about a month of data, against roughly five and a half months in the US.

Position in the conversation

The second headline metric concerns where in a conversation an ad appears. The deck defines a turn as the position of an exchange inside its conversation, turn 1 being the first user message and its reply. Worldwide between March 30 and August 30, CTR was highest at the start: roughly 0.66% at turn 1, 0.65% at turn 2, 0.59% at turn 3 and 0.56% at turn 4 (read from the chart), against 0.36% to 0.48% for turns 5 through 21, which the deck summarizes as 48% higher CTR in the first four turns.

Impressions skew the same way. Between March 30 and August 23, 28% fell in turn 1, 23% in turns 2 and 3, 16% in turns 4 to 6, 12% in turns 7 to 12 and 9% in turns 13 to 21, so the first three turns carry 51%. Another 12% landed in turn 22 or later, a tail the playbook treats as an audience still to be reached. Similarweb's July report, covered by PPC Land, found 66.3% of ChatGPT ads appearing after the second prompt or later, a prompt-based measure the new deck does not reconcile with its turns.

Branded prompts and rival ads

A further slide compares exchanges that carried an ad with those that did not. In September 2026, 61% of exchanges with an ad named a brand, against 36% of exchanges without one. The slide's example is a prompt asking for alternatives to Wix, answered with a list of site builders and a sponsored placement from Lovable. The pattern fits contextual advertising, in which OpenAI matches advertiser-supplied descriptions of a conversational territory against the chat rather than to exact keywords, so a prompt that names one company can surface an advertisement from another. The deck labels this section early and directional.

Who is buying

Ranked by share of worldwide impressions, the deck's leaders are Monday.com and Jotform at 2.23% each, then Resume.io at 2.16%, Booking.com at 1.42%, Design.com at 1.19%, Cursor at 0.97%, ManageEngine at 0.87%, Shopify at 0.84%, HubSpot at 0.83% and Cloudflare at 0.67%. According to the deck, the ten share one trait: each sells "something a user can immediately purchase online".

The US category table, covering the top 10,000 US advertisers between March 30 and August 4, puts B2B SaaS first.

CategoryShare of ChatGPT ad impressionsAdvertisersLeader
B2B SaaS19.9%1,210Monday.com
Retail & Consumer Brands10.4%1,510Home Depot
Business & Professional Services8.5%2,231LegalZoom
Career & Employment5.5%104Resume.io
Developer Tools & Infrastructure4.6%339Cursor
Education & Training4.3%414Preply

Source: Similarweb with Graphite's advertiser taxonomy; top six of 18 categories shown.

Retail is where the package contradicts itself. The deck says retail and ecommerce advertisers "have been largely absent from the platform because their product-feed infrastructure didn't map onto ChatGPT's conversational format", yet its own table gives Retail & Consumer Brands 10.4% of impressions and 1,510 advertisers, second on both counts. Other vendors paint other pictures: Adthena found retail taking 39% of ChatGPT ad items on 24% of US queries, while Sensor Tower put shopping and retail at 21% of US ChatGPT ad spend in August, down from 37% in April. Impressions, placements and spend are different yardsticks, and the sources do not reconcile them. The deck adds that this is "about to change", citing Shopify and HubSpot as OpenAI's first ecommerce and CRM partners and an Amazon Ads pilot extending Amazon DSP campaigns into ChatGPT.

Turnover at the top

The deck shows sixteen advertisers from the top 100 US group in four trajectories between March 30 and August 17: growing (Resume.io, Expedia, Design.com, ZoomInfo), fluctuating (Monday.com, Jotform, Envato, BestMoney), burst (Shopify, HubSpot, Cursor, Canva) and gone (Zapier, Aikido, WSJ, SAP). A tenure chart then counts weeks in the top 10 out of 20. Only Jotform and Resume.io held a place every week. Cursor and Monday.com managed 15, Booking.com 10, and none of the other seven advertisers shown more than 8.

Two captions complicate the reading. The tenure chart's footnote cites March 30 to August 17, while its month axis runs from May to September. The top-advertiser chart's footnote describes "Weeks each brand held a top 10 slot by ad impression share", although the bars show percentages of impressions. Adthena's weekly count of unique ChatGPT advertisers, a different measure, rose from 7,306 to 12,075 between July 9 and August 31, peaked at 13,009 in the week of August 10 and dipped to just over 10,000 two weeks later, a swing consistent with the turnover Graphite describes. The deck's own verdict: "brands are still in experimentation mode."

Creative and landing pages

The Creative section turns on net-new copy. Across ten advertisers running on both ChatGPT and Google Search, only 1.9% of ChatGPT ad headlines exactly match the advertiser's paid search headline, the basis for the slide title that 98% of ChatGPT ad copy is net new. By advertiser, the share runs from 100% for Resume.io and 99.6% for Jotform down to 87.7% for BestMoney and 83.9% for Cursor.

The base is narrow. Ten US advertisers, observed between April and August 2026, stand behind a figure easily read as market-wide. An exact-match test also counts a lightly edited search headline as new, and the chart covers headlines only. The featured examples show the new copy: Jotform's ads follow a template, such as "Free Fillable Free Pay Stub PDF" and "Free Landlord Verification Form PDF", each paired with text offering to edit and download the document with Jotform, while Resume.io's ads name the host platform: "Turn ChatGPT content into a real resume."

Creative volume rises with rank. Among 400+ US advertisers between April 1 and August 16, the median advertiser ranked 1 to 50 by impression share ran 191 distinct ChatGPT ads. The medians fall to 155 for ranks 51 to 100 and to 18 for ranks 401 to 496. The playbook reads the pattern as more creatives helping impression share. The chart shows an association only; it cannot say whether variety wins impressions or impressions pay for variety.

Landing pages follow a similar skew. Between July 19 and August 15, 23% of advertisers used one landing page and 37% used two to five, so 60% used five or fewer; 28% used six to 25, 9% used 26 to 100 and 4% used more than 100. Among the top 50 advertisers by impression share, 63% had six or more. Booking.com and Vistaprint each run more than 500 pages, while Shutterstock, MasterClass and Oura use one. By type, feature, solution and pricing pages account for 37% of landing pages and signup, demo and campaign pages for 16%; articles, guides and listicles make up 5%.

Medians vary by category. Affiliate and comparison sites run 30 landing pages, Travel & Hospitality 18 and Retail & Consumer Brands 14.5, against 4 for the median advertiser overall and 1 for AI Tools & Platforms. Because Graphite's classification matches blind human labels 84.7% of the time, about 15% of pages may carry a label a human reviewer would have chosen differently. OpenAI's OAI-AdsBot crawler visits pages submitted as ads to check policy compliance and relevance.

For ten advertisers present on all three channels, Graphite counted ads live per platform over the trailing 28 days to August 2026, using Similarweb AI Ads, the Meta Ad Library and the Google Ads Transparency Center.

AdvertiserChatGPTMetaGoogle Search
Jotform93331371
Attio9217110
BestMoney239861,557
Resume.io3827252
Envato1791573,111
HubSpot6271218
Monday.com681831,587
Cursor2478204
Canva91614942
Shopify483241,375

Source: Similarweb AI Ads, Meta Ad Library, Google Ads Transparency Center, as published in the report.

Five of the ten run more ads on ChatGPT than on Meta, the basis for the slide title "50% of Top 10 Advertisers Run More Ads on ChatGPT vs Meta". Nine of the ten run more on Google Search than on ChatGPT; Jotform, with 933 ChatGPT ads against 371 on Google Search, is the exception. The count measures ads live, not spend or impressions, and the footnote describes ten advertisers on all three channels rather than the ten largest: Attio, BestMoney, Envato and Canva do not appear in the worldwide top-ten chart.

Graphite's playbook

The final section lists ten recommendations that Graphite says are grounded in the data, among them budgeting ChatGPT as a test rather than a core channel, writing native copy, scaling creatives gradually and expecting turnover. On treating the channel as incremental rather than a replacement, the deck notes that "Google Search still carries far more ad volume than ChatGPT or Meta."

According to Baruch Toledano, VP and GM of Digital Marketing Solutions at Similarweb, "This data gives advertisers a much clearer picture of how a new ad surface actually behaves, rather than assuming it mirrors existing channels."

Why the figures matter, and where they stop

OpenAI's advertising business has changed form quickly. The February 9 pilot gave way, on May 5, to a self-serve Ads Manager open to all US businesses with CPC bidding, a Conversions API and a pixel. OpenAI said on August 31 that the business had passed a $1 billion annualized run rate, a figure that projects a single month across twelve and that PPC Land reported Digiday derived from roughly $83 million in monthly revenue, and on September 23 that ChatGPT Ads were available in more than 60 countries. Public performance data has been thinner: OpenAI's David Dugan told Digiday on June 30 that independent third-party verification would be a natural next step, though he named no vendors.

The report offers a market-wide outside view of reach, click rate and conversational position, and its limits are plain. The deck describes nine live markets, while OpenAI had put ChatGPT Ads in more than 40 countries by August 31, so the nine appear to be the markets Similarweb's panel covers; the report does not say. Similarweb sells the AI Ads dataset covering ChatGPT, and Graphite sells SEO, AEO and paid search services. The report sits behind a form asking for a name and work email, with follow-up emails from both companies attached to the download, according to the landing page. PPC Land has noted that no independent standard exists to reconcile vendor estimates of the channel.

The deck also carries no cost, conversion or incrementality data, which leaves open what a click is worth. And would the audience hold? Comscore data covered by PPC Land put ChatGPT at 50% of US desktop AI prompt volume in June 2026, down from 70% in January, with Gemini at 30% and Claude at 11%. For marketers and agencies, the report amounts to a set of ratios from one panel and one crawl: informative about patterns, silent on size.

Timeline

Summary

  • Who: Similarweb, a publicly listed digital intelligence company, and Graphite, a research-driven growth agency, whose findings concern advertisers and agencies buying or evaluating ads on OpenAI's ChatGPT.
  • What: A 32-slide report covering ad-eligible reach, click-through rate, turn position, advertiser mix and turnover, headline and creative volume, landing pages, a three-channel comparison and a ten-step playbook, built from a Similarweb user panel and a Graphite crawl of more than 98,000 ads and 8,000 landing pages.
  • When: Published September 28, 2026; the panel data runs from March 30 to September 2026, and Graphite's ad collection covers April 1 to August 16, 2026.
  • Where: Nine live ChatGPT markets for the panel data (the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Brazil and Mexico), with the ad-level analysis centered on US advertisers.
  • Why: The companies position the report as a market-wide view of how a new ad surface behaves; the figures are vendor-supplied, show shares rather than volumes, and come from firms that sell related data or services.