It was easy to dismiss ChatGPT ads as a novelty when they launched in early 2026. Now, with over 2,000 brands running campaigns through Criteo’s integration and conversion rates consistently outperforming comparable formats elsewhere, the dismissal window has closed.
The numbers are hard to ignore. Criteo’s Prompt Smart Ads — which auto-generate ad creatives tailored to the context of a user’s query — are showing approximately 4x higher spend after activation. Click-through rates are running 2–3x higher than standard referral environments. And perhaps most striking: more than 80% of ad-driven traffic from ChatGPT represents new customers. This isn’t retargeting dressed up in AI clothing. It’s genuine top-of-funnel reach at a scale that traditional search never delivered.
OpenAI and Criteo have since expanded the program from its initial US, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand footprint into the UK, Japan, and South Korea — with Mexico and Brazil in the queue. Self-service ad buying is now live, opening the ecosystem to brands that couldn’t participate in the closed pilot. Meanwhile, the broader partner stack — Adobe, Kargo, Pacvue, StackAdapt — signals that this is being built as infrastructure, not a feature.
The context makes the scale even more significant. Roughly 68% of US Google searches now end without a click to any website. Zero-click search has been quietly gutting referral traffic for years, and publishers and performance marketers alike have been scrambling for an answer. ChatGPT’s model — where the platform actively recommends products and brands within a conversation — is a fundamentally different proposition. Users who receive a brand recommendation from ChatGPT are reportedly 2.5x more likely to visit that brand within seven days. That’s intent signal, not ambient exposure.
The Next Wave Take: The brands winning on ChatGPT right now aren’t necessarily the biggest spenders — they’re the ones whose product data is cleanest and whose value propositions survive being distilled into a conversational context. As AI becomes the primary interface layer between consumers and commerce, the marketers who have invested in structured data, clear positioning, and genuine differentiation will have a structural advantage. The ad dollar is following the eyeball, and the eyeball is increasingly talking to a chatbot.