Getty Images (NYSE: GETY) yesterday announced a multi-year display agreement with OpenAI that will bring licensed photographs and editorial imagery from the company's content libraries into ChatGPT search and discovery experiences. The announcement, published June 21, 2026, on the Getty Images newsroom, marks the latest in a sequence of deals that visual content companies have struck with AI platforms to establish a licensed model for image use inside conversational search.

What the agreement covers

The deal is specifically a display agreement, not a training agreement. That distinction matters. Under the partnership, Getty Images' content will appear inside ChatGPT to enrich visual responses to user queries - search and discovery experiences, as the company describes them. The announcement does not specify use for model training purposes.

According to Getty Images, the agreement enables licensed content to appear within ChatGPT, with the stated aim of making visual responses more useful and more trustworthy. Craig Peters, Chief Executive Officer at Getty Images, said: "High-quality, licensed visual content makes AI-powered search and discovery more useful and more trustworthy. This partnership with OpenAI reflects a shared recognition of that, and together we will deliver richer visual experiences to ChatGPT users."

The scope of Getty's content libraries is significant context here. According to Getty Images, the company works with almost 600,000 content creators and almost 360 content partners. Each year it covers more than 160,000 news, sport, and entertainment events. The company's photographic archive extends back to the beginning of photography and contains millions of images across its Getty Images, iStock, and Unsplash brands. That archive serves customers in almost every country in the world.

Why display, not training

The framing as a display deal - rather than a licensing arrangement for model training - is not incidental. It places this agreement in a different legal and commercial category from the contracts that AI companies have pursued with publishers and content providers to use material in building foundation models. A display deal means images are retrieved and shown to users, much as a search engine displays images alongside results. The images are not incorporated into the weights of the model itself.

That separation is commercially significant because it does not require Getty to resolve questions about how its copyrighted content interacts with the training process. The agreement is a distribution arrangement: Getty supplies imagery, OpenAI displays it inside ChatGPT, and users receive richer visual context alongside text-based answers.

The question of what constitutes lawful use of visual content in AI systems has been actively contested in courts and licensing markets. A UK High Court ruling in November 2025 dismissed Getty's main copyright infringement claims against Stability AI, ruling that AI models do not reproduce or store copies of photographs during training. The court did find narrow trademark violations related to watermarks. Getty expressed concern about ongoing risks to intellectual property owners despite that partial result. The OpenAI deal takes a different route entirely, building a commercial licensing relationship rather than a litigation outcome.

OpenAI's expanding content relationships

The deal arrives at a moment when OpenAI is building out a layered advertising and content infrastructure inside ChatGPT. The company opened a self-serve Ads Manager beta to all US businesses on May 5, 2026, introducing cost-per-click bidding alongside the existing cost-per-mille model and dropping the minimum spend threshold. The ad units inside ChatGPT include an image asset field, a title, description copy, and a landing page. OpenAI's own documentation specifies that logos should not be used as the primary visual element in image creative, pushing advertisers toward product or lifestyle photography.

Licensed, high-quality photography is therefore relevant to both the organic visual experience inside ChatGPT and the paid advertising layer being built on top of it. Whether the Getty deal is connected in any operational way to the advertising infrastructure is not stated in the announcement. The agreement describes display within search and discovery experiences, which is a function that predates the advertising rollout.

OpenAI's internal advertising revenue target for 2026 is $2.4 billion, set against estimated losses of around $14 billion. The pilot crossed $100 million in annualized revenue within six weeks of its February 9, 2026 launch. Conversion-optimized campaigns began rolling out in early June 2026. The platform has been adding product capabilities at speed - within roughly four months from pilot launch to self-serve, CPC bidding, a Conversions API, pixel tracking, and conversion optimization campaigns.

Getty's pattern of AI platform deals

Today's announcement is not the first time Getty Images has established a display relationship with an AI-powered search platform. According to the Getty Images newsroom, the company and Perplexity struck a multi-year image partnership on October 31, 2025, allowing Perplexity to display images from Getty Images across its AI-powered search tools. The Perplexity deal preceded the OpenAI agreement by almost eight months and appears to follow the same structural logic: licensed display use inside an AI search or discovery interface, with Getty Images content enriching visual responses.

The Perplexity deal came at a period when AI search was expanding rapidly. Perplexity announced Comet Plus on October 1, 2025, a $5 standalone subscription providing users access to premium content from major publishers. The broader Perplexity ecosystem has since faced legal scrutiny over content use practices, with CNN filing a copyright and trademark lawsuit against Perplexity on May 28, 2026, alleging unauthorized reproduction of more than 17,000 works. Getty's own licensing approach - pursuing formal agreements rather than relying on informal use - contrasts with the contested content practices that have drawn litigation from publishers.

The January 2025 merger agreement between Getty Images and Shutterstock, valued at approximately $3.7 billion, would create a combined entity with substantially greater content depth if completed. The UK Competition and Markets Authority referred the proposed merger for a Phase 2 review in October 2025. The combined content library would represent a significantly larger pool of potential licensed material available for display arrangements with AI platforms.

How ChatGPT's visual layer has developed

ChatGPT's integration of visual content into search and discovery represents a structural shift from its origins as a text-only interface. OpenAI launched ChatGPT Search on October 31, 2024, using Bing services to power web search capabilities. The visual dimension of responses has expanded from there. As of January 2026, OpenAI announced advertising tests for ChatGPT starting within weeks, with the platform at that point reaching 700 million weekly active users. The company's Chief Product Officer had confirmed multiple services power the search implementation, with Bing playing an important role.

Embedding licensed Getty Images content into search and discovery experiences places professional, commercially cleared photography inside a product used by hundreds of millions of people. The images that appear are not generated by AI. They are photographs taken by human photographers working with Getty Images under defined licensing terms, retrieved and displayed in response to user intent signals.

That distinction carries practical consequences for content creators and media businesses. A display arrangement means usage is tracked, licensing terms apply, and content creators operate within a compensation framework, however structured. The alternative, in a world where AI systems freely retrieve and display uncredited imagery, is a framing that has motivated much of the litigation and regulatory pressure in AI content use over the past two years.

Scale and technical context

According to Getty Images, the company operates through three consumer-facing brands: Getty Images, iStock, and Unsplash. iStock provides mid-market licensed content, while Unsplash historically operated a free-to-use photography platform that Getty acquired in 2021. The content offering also includes Custom Content solutions, Premium Access licensing, an API integration layer, and assignment photography services. The event coverage operation producing more than 160,000 events per year is the editorial backbone - sports, news, and entertainment photography that captures breaking events and cultural moments in professionally licensed form.

The API integration layer is particularly relevant to the ChatGPT display arrangement. Large-scale image retrieval inside a conversational AI interface almost certainly operates through programmatic integration rather than manual curation. Getty operates API services for customers and technology partners, which provides the technical pathway through which licensed imagery can flow into third-party platforms at search-query speed.

According to Getty Images, the company also operates its own generative AI capabilities, trained on permissioned content that includes indemnification and perpetual, worldwide usage rights. Customers can use text-to-image generation through Getty's own tools to create commercially safe visuals. This separates Getty's generative offering from models trained on unlicensed internet data - a distinction Getty has leaned on in its legal and commercial positioning.

What it means for the marketing and advertising community

The intersection of licensed visual content and AI-powered search has direct implications for marketers. Visual content in search and discovery experiences influences how brands and products appear in AI-generated responses. If ChatGPT users encounter licensed photography alongside text answers, the editorial and commercial imagery that appears shapes perception of topics, brands, categories, and events.

ChatGPT's lead in generative AI traffic has been compressing, falling from 86.6% share twelve months ago to below 65% by early 2026 as Gemini and other platforms gained users. Despite that erosion, ChatGPT remains the dominant platform for generative AI traffic and referrals. Brands and products that appear within ChatGPT's visual layer - through licensed photography in editorial contexts or through advertising creative - gain exposure to a user base that the January 2026 announcement put at 700 million weekly active users.

The ChatGPT advertising platform's image creative field connects to this dynamic. Advertisers building campaigns for ChatGPT Ads Manager supply image assets that appear alongside title text and description copy. Getty Images' licensed content is available to advertisers building those assets through the company's standard licensing channels, separate from the display partnership announced today.

Research from Similarweb published on June 21, 2026 found that brands recommended within AI platforms were 2.5 times more likely to receive a website visit within seven days. Roughly 56% of that downstream traffic arrived through branded search rather than a direct click. If the visual layer inside ChatGPT influences which brands users recall and subsequently search for, the presence or absence of relevant licensed imagery in AI search responses carries measurable downstream consequences.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Getty Images (NYSE: GETY), a global visual content company operating the Getty Images, iStock, and Unsplash brands, and OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

What: A multi-year display agreement under which Getty Images' licensed content libraries will appear across OpenAI's search and discovery experiences within ChatGPT, enhancing the visual richness of responses without being incorporated into model training.

When: The announcement was made on June 21, 2026. The agreement is described as multi-year; no specific end date or commencement date beyond the announcement date is disclosed.

Where: The display arrangement operates within ChatGPT, OpenAI's conversational AI platform used by hundreds of millions of people globally. Getty Images operates content infrastructure in almost every country in the world.

Why: As conversational AI platforms become significant surfaces for search and discovery, licensed visual content has become a commercial and editorial priority. The deal allows Getty Images to extend its licensing model into AI-native search interfaces, while OpenAI gains access to a large archive of professionally cleared photography to improve the visual quality of ChatGPT responses. Both parties position the agreement around making AI-powered search more useful and more trustworthy for users.