New forecasts published in April 2026 quantify how much of Google's advertising revenue OpenAI is targeting with ChatGPT - and which parts of that business it is not.

On April 14, 2026, Barclays published a research note titled "Looking Steady Here, the AI Ads Are Coming," projecting that ChatGPT advertising revenue will reach $2.4 billion in 2026 and climb to $102 billion by 2030. EMARKETER subsequently published a data table drawing on those projections. Separately, on April 9, 2026, Reuters reported that OpenAI had told investors to expect $2.5 billion in ad revenue this year and $100 billion by 2030, according to Axios, citing a source familiar with recent presentations to investors.

The figures are routinely set against Alphabet's total advertising revenue of $294.69 billion in 2025, according to Reuters. Google's advertising business, however, is not a single product. It comprises three structurally different revenue lines - search, video, and a publisher network. According to Reuters, OpenAI is making efforts to grab market share in the ad industry dominated by Google and Meta - and the surface it has built so far, conversational placements within a chat interface, maps most directly onto the search line.

Breaking down what Google's $294bn really is

According to Alphabet's Q4 2025 earnings release, published February 4, 2026, Google's total advertising revenues for the fourth quarter alone reached $82.3 billion - composed of $63.1 billion in Google Search and other, $11.4 billion in YouTube ads, and $7.8 billion in Google Network revenues from AdSense, AdMob, and Ad Manager placements across third-party publisher properties.

Extrapolating from the quarterly figures, Google Search and other generated roughly $224 billion across full-year 2025, based on reported quarterly figures of $50.7 billion in Q1 (from Alphabet's Q1 2025 earnings), an estimated $53.4 billion in Q2, $56.6 billion in Q3 (reported by Alphabet in October 2025), and $63.1 billion in Q4. YouTube advertising contributed approximately $40 billion for the full year, with the company confirming in its Q4 2025 earnings that YouTube's combined ad and subscription revenues exceeded $60 billion for 2025. Google Network properties added roughly $31 billion.

Those three lines are not interchangeable. Google Search generates revenue because users type commercial queries into a search box and receive links alongside paid results - a surface built on purchase intent signals that have been refined over 25 years. YouTube generates revenue from video advertising against a content library of hundreds of millions of videos created by third parties. Google Network generates revenue by distributing ads across millions of external publisher websites through a programmatic infrastructure that took over a decade to build.

ChatGPT is building a conversational ad surface. The search line - roughly $224 billion in 2025 - is the segment where conversational AI most directly competes for the same commercial intent queries that have historically gone to Google Search. OpenAI's 2030 advertising target of $102 billion sits below that single line.

The Barclays model in detail

The Barclays forecast, as reproduced by EMARKETER, breaks the ChatGPT advertising opportunity into component parts: user growth, query volume, and revenue per query. Each of those variables carries significant uncertainty over a four-year horizon.

On user growth, the model projects that the number of advertisable users - those eligible to see ads inside ChatGPT - will grow from 0.7 billion in 2026 to 1.7 billion by 2030. Queries from those users are projected to rise from 1,002 billion annually in 2026 to 2,485 billion by 2030, with the sharpest single-year increase of 34% occurring in 2027. The model assumes a constant 4.0 queries per user per day throughout the projection period, drawn from the Barclays research note "How People Use ChatGPT."

Revenue per query is where the arithmetic becomes most consequential. In 2026, the projected revenue per query stands at $0.002 - representing just 6% of Google's search revenue per query, which Barclays calculates using 2025 revenue and 5.25 trillion queries. By 2027, that figure is projected to rise to $0.008, a 243% year-over-year increase. It continues to $0.014 in 2028, $0.024 in 2029, and $0.041 by 2030 - at which point, according to the model, ChatGPT's revenue per query would represent 96% of Google's current search RPQ.

Annual revenue per user (ARPU) follows the same trajectory. From $3.50 in 2026, the model projects ARPU rising to $12.00 in 2027, $20.00 in 2028, $35.00 in 2029, and $60.00 by 2030. The jump from $3.50 to $12.00 between 2026 and 2027 - a 243% increase - reflects the assumption that OpenAI will transition from a limited pilot to a mature auction-based platform within 12 months.

As a proportion of OpenAI's total revenue, advertising is projected to grow from 8% in 2026 to 36% by 2030. That would represent a fundamental shift in the company's revenue composition - from a business funded primarily by subscriptions and API access to one where advertising accounts for more than a third of income.

What the RPQ convergence assumption requires

The most contested element of the Barclays model is the implicit assumption that Google will not meaningfully increase its own revenue per query while ChatGPT's RPQ climbs toward parity. By 2030, the model has ChatGPT at 96% of Google's current search RPQ. That figure was calculated using 2025 data.

Two comments on a LinkedIn post sharing the EMARKETER table raised specific questions about the model's assumptions. Steven Plimmer, a digital marketing professional, wrote: "Can't claim to buy those numbers - I mean, what AI will even look like in 2030 is anyone's guess. It could be running the government for all we know. But 96% of RPQ of Google is only explicable if Google does nothing to increase its own RPQ, and that, my friend, is desperately unlikely." Martin Grosse, Head of SEA and Programmatic Display at Suchmeisterei GmbH, asked: "Revenue per query from .0002 to .041? Do they plan for a wall of ads or are the giving us a heads up to planned cpc-growth?"

The Barclays model uses 2025 as its Google RPQ baseline and projects ChatGPT closing to 96% of that figure by 2030. Google's search RPQ in 2025 reflects decades of advertiser auction competition, Quality Score mechanics, and commercial intent signals across billions of queries per day.

For context, Alphabet announced in its Q4 2025 earnings that 2026 capital expenditure investments are anticipated to be between $175 billion and $185 billion. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, said in the earnings release: "To meet customer demand and capitalize on the growing opportunities we have ahead of us, our 2026 CapEx investments are anticipated to be in the range of $175 to $185 billion." Alphabet subsequently raised $85 billion to fund that infrastructure buildout.

Pichai also noted in the Q4 2025 earnings release that "Search saw more usage than ever before, with AI continuing to drive an expansionary moment" - suggesting that Google is treating AI not as a threat to its search monetization but as a mechanism to extend it. The Gemini App, he said, had grown to over 750 million monthly active users.

Where the ChatGPT pilot actually stands

Against those projections, the early data from OpenAI's advertising pilot provides useful grounding. According to Reuters, an OpenAI spokesperson disclosed on March 26, 2026 that ChatGPT's advertising pilot had crossed $100 million in annualized revenue within six weeks of launch, with over 600 advertisers in the program at that point. That annualized figure means the actual revenue earned over six weeks was approximately $11.5 million.

Reuters also noted that OpenAI said in January it would start showing ads to some U.S. users to help fund soaring development costs, with placements initially tested on the free tier and the lower-priced Go plan. The company had expanded to over 600 advertisers at the time the $100 million annualized threshold was crossed, according to Reuters.

As PPC Land has documented in its coverage of the ChatGPT advertising pilot, one data point from that early period is significant for advertisers evaluating the channel: Criteo reported that LLM-referred users converted at 1.5 times the rate of other referral channels. If that conversion premium holds at scale, it would partially justify higher CPMs and could support a faster-than-expected RPQ ramp. It is also a single data point from a controlled early pilot with fewer than 1,000 advertisers.

The infrastructure buildout since February has been fast. CPMs dropped from $60 at launch to as low as $25 within nine weeks, as OpenAI cut access thresholds to attract broader participation. The minimum spend requirement was progressively reduced from $200,000 to $50,000 and then eliminated entirely when OpenAI opened the self-serve Ads Manager to all U.S. businesses on May 5, 2026, simultaneously introducing cost-per-click bidding and a Conversions API. Custom audience targeting was added in May 2026, bringing a piece of infrastructure that Meta built into its platform years ago.

The speed of that buildout is notable. In roughly four months, OpenAI moved from no advertising business to a self-serve interface, programmatic partnerships, a pixel and Conversions API, CPC bidding, and custom audiences. But infrastructure is not revenue. The pace of feature shipping does not resolve the question of whether OpenAI can build the advertiser competition and query monetization that the 2030 projections require.

The revenue gap and what fills it

OpenAI's motivation for entering advertising is not ambiguous. According to Reuters, the company is projected to lose approximately $14 billion in 2026. Advertising is being built as structural revenue to offset those losses and fund continued AI development, alongside subscription revenue and API access. The $2.5 billion target for 2026 would represent meaningful progress against a $14 billion loss, but would not close it.

The search line is the specific segment OpenAI is targeting. According to Alphabet's Q4 2025 earnings, Google Search and other revenues grew 17% to $63.1 billion in Q4 2025 alone. Pichai noted in the earnings release that "Search saw more usage than ever before, with AI continuing to drive an expansionary moment" - framing AI not as a threat to search monetization but as a mechanism extending it.

Google Network revenues, which cover third-party publisher monetization, have been in structural decline - down 3% in Q4 2025 and accelerating to a 4% decline in Q1 2026 - partly because AI-mediated interfaces reduce the traffic that flows to external websites. That pressure is something OpenAI's advertising model exacerbates rather than inherits. A user who gets an answer inside ChatGPT is not clicking through to a publisher page where a display ad might appear. OpenAI is not building a network business. It has no inventory beyond its own interface.

YouTube's approximately $40 billion in advertising revenue for 2025 rests on a content library built by millions of creators, pre-roll and mid-roll video formats embedded in content that users actively choose to watch, and a rights management infrastructure. ChatGPT generates text and image responses to queries. The two formats address different advertiser objectives and different moments in the user journey.

Why the marketing community should track both trajectories

The forecasts matter for the marketing community not because they settle a competitive question but because they define the range of outcomes that budget allocation decisions are being made against. As PPC Land has tracked since the pilot launched, the emergence of conversational AI as an advertising channel introduces measurement challenges that existing frameworks were not designed to handle. Traditional digital advertising relies on impression-level reporting, click tracking, pixel-based attribution, and deterministic audience matching. ChatGPT's ad targeting operates through context hints - phrases advertisers supply to describe the types of conversations where their products may be relevant - rather than through keyword harvesting or behavioral profiling.

The Barclays model's RPQ projections imply that OpenAI will close the monetization gap with Google search as the platform matures and advertiser competition deepens. The two trajectories - a $224 billion search advertising business and a $2.4 billion conversational ad pilot at the start of 2026 - are the numbers the marketing community is now tracking in parallel.

Timeline

Summary

Who: OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is the subject of the advertising revenue projections. Barclays produced the core forecast data, with EMARKETER publishing a table drawing on those figures. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, provides the benchmark for comparison through its Q4 2025 earnings release. Reuters and Axios reported on OpenAI's investor presentations.

What: Barclays projected on April 14, 2026 that ChatGPT advertising revenue will reach $2.4 billion in 2026 and $102 billion by 2030. OpenAI's own investor presentations, as reported by Axios and Reuters, cite $2.5 billion for 2026 and $100 billion by 2030. The comparison against Google's $294.69 billion total 2025 advertising revenue obscures the more relevant benchmark: Google Search alone generated roughly $224 billion in 2025, already exceeding OpenAI's entire 2030 advertising target. YouTube ads contributed a further $40 billion and Google Network approximately $31 billion - neither of which OpenAI is building.

When: The Barclays research note was published April 14, 2026. The Reuters report on OpenAI's investor presentations appeared April 9, 2026. Alphabet's Q4 2025 earnings were published February 4, 2026. The ChatGPT advertising pilot launched February 9, 2026.

Where: The projections cover ChatGPT's global advertising business, initially piloted in the United States and since expanded to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and several other markets. Google's advertising operates globally across search, YouTube, and network properties.

Why: OpenAI is projected to lose approximately $14 billion in 2026 and is building advertising as structural revenue to offset those losses and fund continued AI development. The projections matter for the marketing community because they signal the potential emergence of a new conversational advertising channel competing for search budgets - though the structural differences between ChatGPT's single interface and Google's diversified advertising portfolio mean the competitive framing requires more precision than a simple revenue-to-revenue comparison provides.