A new forecast published on June 4, 2026 by EMARKETER projects that US advertising spending in and around artificial intelligence platforms will more than double from $32.03 billion this year to $68.25 billion by 2030, yet the data delivers a pointed correction to the most aggressive claims circulating about chatbot advertising - including OpenAI's own projection of $100 billion in global ad revenues by 2030.

The shape of AI ad growth: adjacent, not conversational

The report, titled "US AI Advertising Forecast 2026," was authored by Nate Elliott, EMARKETER's Principal Analyst for AI in Marketing and Commerce, and published on June 4. Elliott joined EMARKETER in August 2025 after eight months as Senior Director of Research Intelligence at Morning Consult and nearly nine years running his own research consultancy, Nineteen Insights, where he produced custom studies for clients including LinkedIn, the IAB, Hootsuite, and Digiday.

The central finding is structural rather than numerical. According to EMARKETER, more than 80% of AI advertising in 2026 will appear next to AI content - such as traditional search ads placed alongside Google AI Overviews - rather than inside AI chatbots or conversations. That ratio does not flip by 2030. Even at the end of the forecast window, ads placed adjacent to AI-generated content will still represent the majority of the overall AI advertising market.

The forecast covers three distinct ad types. AI search-adjacent advertising - the largest category - includes traditional keyword-based search ads that appear next to AI-generated summaries such as Google AI Overviews. AI conversational search advertising covers ads inside search engine-based chatbot experiences, such as Google AI Mode. AI chatbot advertising, the smallest and most contentious segment, refers to ads inside standalone large language model platforms such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Gemini. The chart accompanying the report shows the AI chatbot slice in red, remaining visibly thin across all five years of the projection.

What the numbers say about chatbots specifically

The distinction matters because it isolates exactly what OpenAI is competing for. According to EMARKETER, ChatGPT and its direct competitors - the standalone chatbot category - will generate less than $1 billion in US chatbot advertising revenue in 2026. By 2030, that figure rises to just over $5 billion. Even if OpenAI captured every dollar of that segment, it would fall dramatically short of the $100 billion global target the company has described to investors.

Elliott posted the core argument on LinkedIn on June 9 "OpenAI thinks ChatGPT will collect about $50 billion in US ad revenues in 2030," he wrote. "We think their entire addressable market will be 1/10th that."

Three specific structural headwinds underpin the chatbot forecast. First, the ad load problem: chatbots cannot accommodate the same density of advertising as search engines. According to Elliott's analysis, to reach even the numbers EMARKETER projects for chatbot ads, platforms would need to insert paid placements into nearly every commercial response. Second, chatbot CPMs are already declining. The report notes that ChatGPT launched its advertising pilot at a $60 CPM. EMARKETER projects that price will fall to barely one-quarter of that level - approximately $15 - by 2030. Reports from April 2026 documented CPMs dropping to $25 within weeks of the pilot's February launch, suggesting the compression is already under way.

Third, and most consequentially in Elliott's framing: chatbots themselves will not dominate consumer AI usage. The majority of consumer AI interaction, and therefore the majority of AI advertising inventory, will occur on Google Search and its associated AI tools - not on standalone chatbot platforms. That distribution of user attention is the primary reason why search-adjacent formats are expected to vastly outperform conversational ones.

The incumbency advantage in AI advertising

The argument that traditional search will persist is not a simple defence of the status quo. EMARKETER's forecast includes a specific claim that AI users search more often than non-AI users, and that traditional search advertising revenues will continue growing through 2030. That has implications for the budget allocation debates that many marketing teams are currently navigating.

Big Tech's Q1 2026 earnings, covered by PPC Land in May, showed Google Search and Other grew 19% to $60.4 billion. YouTube advertising brought in $9.88 billion. Google Network revenue - AdSense, AdMob, and Ad Manager - fell 4% to $6.97 billion. The contrast between the growth of search and the contraction of distributed network revenue is directly relevant to the EMARKETER forecast's thesis: the structural advantage in AI advertising belongs to platforms with deep search infrastructure, not to conversation-first products built on top of language models.

Alphabet raised $85 billion in early June 2026 to fund AI infrastructure it describes as supply-constrained, combining a private placement to Berkshire Hathaway, an oversubscribed public offering, and an at-the-market program. The scale of that capital commitment reflects the company's conviction that the AI advertising infrastructure play runs through search surfaces, not through standalone chatbots.

Google has been steadily expanding the monetisation of its AI search surfaces throughout 2025 and into 2026. The company expanded AI Overview ads to 11 countries in December 2025, including Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, and Singapore. Shopping ads in AI Mode were formally announced in February 2026, at a time when the product had already reached more than 75 million daily active users. By May 2026, Google Marketing Live introduced Conversational Discovery ads and Highlighted Answers as new AI Mode ad formats, both in testing in the United States.

AI conversational search: the middle category

Between the search-adjacent behemoth and the chatbot underperformer sits a third category: AI conversational search, covering ads inside search engine-based AI experiences. This segment is scaling faster than chatbot advertising, according to EMARKETER, benefiting from the commercial intent signals that users bring to search-like tasks. When a user types a query into Google AI Mode or Bing Copilot Search, the commercial context is similar to a traditional search query - they are in retrieval mode, looking for products or answers that may be commercially relevant.

This is a materially different user state from the open-ended task completion, coding, writing, and research sessions that define most ChatGPT interactions. The distinction, Elliott argues on LinkedIn, is fundamental: "Search monetized because users were already in commercial retrieval mode. Ads appeared next to expressed demand. They helped." His implication is that replicating that monetisation formula in an environment where users are asking a chatbot to debug code or draft an email is substantially harder.

OpenAI's actual advertising trajectory in 2026

The EMARKETER forecast sits in pointed contrast to a series of projections published by or about OpenAI in recent months. On April 14, 2026, Barclays projected that ChatGPT advertising revenue would reach $2.4 billion in 2026 and climb to $102 billion by 2030. Reuters, citing Axios and a source familiar with investor presentations, separately reported that OpenAI had told investors to expect $2.5 billion in US ad revenue this year and $100 billion by 2030. EMARKETER's US-only chatbot advertising figure for 2030 is roughly $5 billion - a fraction of those projections.

The gap is explained partly by market definition and partly by structural skepticism. The Barclays model assumes rapid CPM recovery and query volume growth that EMARKETER's forecast does not endorse. For CPMs specifically, EMARKETER's projection of sub-$15 pricing by 2030 represents a continuation of a trend already visible in April 2026, when prices had fallen from $60 to $25 within the first nine weeks of the advertising pilot. That pace of compression, if sustained, complicates the revenue arithmetic considerably.

OpenAI's advertising product has nonetheless moved with notable speed in operational terms. The pilot formally launched on February 9, 2026, with early participants including Target, Ford, Mrs. Meyer's, and Adobe. The minimum spend at launch was between $200,000 and $250,000. By May 5, 2026, OpenAI opened the self-serve Ads Manager to all US businesses with no minimum spend, adding CPC bidding and a Conversions API. The ChatGPT advertising pilot crossed $100 million in annualized revenue within six weeks of launch, according to an OpenAI spokesperson quoted by Reuters on March 26. That annualized figure means approximately $11.5 million was earned during the six-week window itself.

The pace of feature additions since the pilot opened is striking. Between May 5 and June 5, 2026 - a span of 26 days - OpenAI added custom audience targeting, daily budget controls, ZIP-code-level geo-targeting, and conversion optimization. CPA bidding was activated for select advertisers. UK inventory went live on June 6, 2026. The infrastructure build is real. The question EMARKETER's forecast poses is whether the market being built is the market OpenAI's revenue targets assume.

Context from the broader AI advertising market

The EMARKETER forecast lands inside a wider conversation about how AI advertising money will be allocated. A December 2025 forecast from analyst Debra Aho Williamson predicted that 2026 would be the year AI platforms emerged alongside social and retail media as significant advertising destinations - a prediction that broadly aligns with the direction of the EMARKETER numbers, even if the scale of chatbot-specific revenue differs significantly.

The IAB's 2026 Outlook Study, released in January 2026, projected 9.5% US ad spend growth overall, driven partly by agentic AI for campaign execution. That study's framing positioned AI as a campaign management tool as much as an advertising surface - a distinction the EMARKETER report reinforces by separating the inventory types.

The note in the EMARKETER chart is worth reading precisely. The forecast includes advertising that appears within LLM generative AI platforms (ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot) and within or alongside AI-powered search summaries (Google AI Overviews) and AI-powered search conversations (Google AI Mode, Bing Copilot Search). It explicitly excludes traditional keyword-based search ads and standard paid listings on search engine result pages where no AI-generated content is present. The exclusion matters because it means the $32.03 billion figure for 2026 represents genuine AI-adjacent inventory only - it does not conflate Google's entire $224 billion advertising business with AI ad spend.

On the LinkedIn thread discussing the forecast, Nate Elliott addressed the question of methodology directly. On the debate about chatbot revenue forecasting, he wrote: "my guess is lazy forecasting, and obvious ulterior motives."

What the forecast means for advertising practitioners

The practical consequence of EMARKETER's projection is that the largest portion of AI advertising budget allocation - by a considerable margin - will flow through formats that resemble and extend traditional search advertising rather than through net-new conversational interfaces. That has direct implications for how planning teams should think about channel strategy.

A May 2026 TripleLift survey of 200 advertising industry respondents found that the external AI environment is moving faster than internal adoption within most organisations. Platforms are deploying AI advertising tools rapidly; advertisers are in many cases still building the internal workflows to use them consistently. The EMARKETER forecast suggests that the platforms most likely to benefit from AI advertising budgets in the near term are those with established auction infrastructure and high-intent search inventory - not those building new conversational ad surfaces from scratch.

The 2.1x growth figure - AI ad spend more than doubling from 2026 to 2030 - is substantial in absolute terms. $68.25 billion in 2030 represents a significant market. The argument EMARKETER makes is not that AI advertising will underperform but that the money will concentrate in different places than the most optimistic forecasts project.

Timeline

Summary

Who: EMARKETER, the research and data firm, published the forecast. Nate Elliott, Principal Analyst for AI in Marketing and Commerce at EMARKETER since August 2025, is the report's named author. The forecast directly addresses projections made by OpenAI regarding ChatGPT's advertising revenue potential.

What: The "US AI Advertising Forecast 2026" projects that US AI advertising spending will grow from $32.03 billion in 2026 to $68.25 billion in 2030, a 2.1x increase over five years. The report forecasts that more than 80% of AI advertising in 2026 - and the majority through 2030 - will appear adjacent to AI content such as Google AI Overviews, not inside standalone AI chatbots. ChatGPT and comparable chatbot platforms are projected to generate less than $1 billion in US chatbot advertising revenue in 2026 and just over $5 billion in 2030, far below OpenAI's stated $100 billion global target.

When: The report was published on June 4, 2026. The forecast covers the period from 2026 through 2030.

Where: The forecast covers US advertising markets only. The AI advertising categories tracked include placements within LLM platforms such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, within AI-powered search summaries such as Google AI Overviews, and within AI-powered search conversations such as Google AI Mode and Bing Copilot Search.

Why: The forecast matters because it offers a structural counter-argument to the most aggressive chatbot advertising projections at a moment when OpenAI is actively building its advertising business. ChatGPT CPMs launched at $60 and had already fallen to $25 within nine weeks. EMARKETER projects continued CPM compression to below $15 by 2030. The firm's core argument is that consumer AI usage - and therefore AI advertising inventory - will concentrate on Google Search and its AI tools, not on standalone chatbot platforms, and that the search-adjacent advertising formats that already exist will capture the vast majority of AI advertising growth through the end of the decade.