ChatGPT Ads Have Reached Sweden – The Answer Is Still Not for Sale

OpenAI’s ad business reached a $1 billion annualized run rate in under 200 days and opened self-serve buying to Swedish companies on August 31. The first independent studies show what that money buys inside ChatGPT, and why the answer itself still has to be earned through SEO, according to experts.

Since August 24, Swedish users on ChatGPT’s Free and Go plans see sponsored messages beneath their answers. One week later, OpenAI opened its self-serve Ads Manager to companies in Sweden and 30 other European markets.

Techarenan News has followed the shift in search together with SEO expert Jorge Castro, founder of Growth Marketing Sweden and jorgecastro.ai, since October 2025, first on AI agents and then in March on the next chapter of SEO. This time the topic is money.

“The speed is remarkable,” Castro says. “But look at what is actually for sale. It is the box under the answer, not the answer.”

A $1 billion run rate in 200 days

OpenAI began testing ads in the US in February. On August 31, the company said ChatGPT Ads had passed $1 billion in annualized revenue run rate in less than 200 days, with tens of thousands of advertisers in more than 40 countries.

The reaction was mixed. eMarketer analyst Nate Elliott told Reuters the milestone was both impressive and a disappointment, since the pace leaves OpenAI well short of its own target of $2.5 billion in ad revenue for 2026. The company has told investors it expects $100 billion by the end of the decade.

The product is moving just as fast. On September 10, Amazon began letting selected US advertisers buy ChatGPT ads through its own ad platform. On September 16, OpenAI started testing Sponsored Agents, where a click on an ad opens a clearly labeled conversation with the advertiser’s own AI agent inside ChatGPT. Wayfair and Angi are among the first brands in the test.

What the first studies show

Independent data is starting to arrive, all of it from the US. SEO platform SE Ranking analyzed over 50,000 commercial prompts and found an ad on 25.94 percent of them, close to the 29.45 percent it measured earlier in Google’s AI Mode. ChatGPT shows a single ad per answer, and roughly one in seven ads had no real connection to the question asked.

The finding Castro considers most important is a different one. In 96.37 percent of placements, the company paying for the ad was nowhere to be found among the sources in the answer above it.

AI visibility company Otterly tracked shopping questions across 16 industries for two weeks in July. 76.4 percent of the answers carried an ad, and in 12 of 14 industries the market leader bought none. The heaviest buyers were comparison sites and challenger brands.

“That is an open window for Nordic challengers,” Castro says. “The leaders are not defending the space yet.”

Advertisers’ own tests point in different directions. Search Engine Journal’s review of published campaigns found clicks costing anywhere from $3 to $22, and noted that OpenAI has not published any benchmarks. One B2B advertiser traced 336 paid clicks back to 146 organizations and found that only five matched its ideal customer. The first academic audit of the platform, published in August, found that new accounts begin to see ads two weeks after they are created, and that accounts signaling lower income are shown more ads regardless of racial or ethnic group.

Why this is an SEO story

In March, Castro told Techarenan News that the fundamentals of SEO remain intact. The ad launch, he argues, proves the point. OpenAI states that advertising does not influence ChatGPT’s answers, and SE Ranking’s numbers suggest the two systems barely touch.

“Paying gets you the slot below the answer,” Castro says. “Being named in the answer is still earned, and that is SEO work: content that is clear, crawlable and credible enough for the model to use.”

There is also a group that ads cannot reach at all. Ads are shown only on the Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscribers never see them. When SE Ranking ran its own campaign, it got 1,263 clicks but very few sign-ups, and concluded that its ideal customers are heavy AI users on paid, ad-free plans.

“In many B2B companies, the people who pay for ChatGPT are exactly the decision-makers you want,” Castro says. “The only way to reach them inside ChatGPT is to be part of the answer.”

The third link is technical. OpenAI sends a dedicated crawler, OAI-AdsBot, to landing pages submitted as ads, both to check them against policy and to use the page content when deciding when the ad is relevant. Strict bot protection from services such as Cloudflare can stop the crawler before it reaches the page.

“If your firewall blocks the crawler, or the page says something different from the ad, you have lost before the auction starts,” Castro says. “Technical SEO has quietly become an advertising requirement.”

Sponsored agents and trust

In a survey of 1,000 US users of AI assistants by research firm Zappi, 82 percent rated ads in AI assistants as at least as trustworthy as Google search ads. One in three still worried that answers would become biased toward advertisers. Among subscribers of The Information, 77 percent said they would not trust an ad-supported chatbot to give unbiased answers.

Research gives the concern some weight. When researchers instructed 23 language models to favor a sponsor, 18 of them recommended the sponsored product more than half the time, even though it cost nearly twice as much as the alternative. The experiment did not test ChatGPT’s ad system, where ads sit outside the answer, but it shows what is at stake if that line moves.

“A year ago I said we were entering the agentic era. Now you can sponsor an agent inside ChatGPT,” Castro says. “The label says sponsored, but the experience is a conversation. That is where trust will be tested.”

OpenAI says a Sponsored Agent conversation is kept separate from ChatGPT’s own answers and from the chat the user originally started. “For now, the answer is not for sale”, Castro concludes.

Europe starts with less data

Every study so far is American. In Europe, personalization is more restricted than in the US, so ads lean more heavily on the conversation itself, and US benchmarks cannot simply be carried over.

“Swedish companies should treat this as a test with a fixed budget and a fixed period,” Castro says. “Judge it on what a customer costs, not on click-through rate.”

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Tips from Jorge Castro to companies considering ChatGPT ads:

• Check the answer before you buy the slot. Ask ChatGPT the questions your customers ask and see whether you are named, and who is. That shows where you need SEO and where an ad can help.
• Let OpenAI’s crawlers in. Make sure robots.txt, firewall, and bot protection allow OAI-AdsBot and OAI-SearchBot, and that the landing page matches the ad.
• Set up measurement first. Install the pixel and tag every link before the campaign starts, then compare the cost per customer with your other channels.