OpenAI is turning advertising inside ChatGPT from an experimental awareness channel into a performance marketing platform – a move that could divert budgets from search, social and retail media while creating a powerful new source of traffic for retailers.
The company has begun rolling out conversion-optimised cost-per-click campaigns, known as oCPC, through its ChatGPT Ads platform. Advertisers can now ask OpenAI’s delivery system to favour clicks most likely to produce a specified action, such as a purchase, registration or lead.
Unlike cost-per-acquisition advertising, however, brands still pay for each valid click rather than each completed conversion. The advertiser supplies a target CPA as a bidding signal, while OpenAI combines the chosen conversion event with factors including relevance, ad quality, click probability and conversion likelihood to determine delivery. OpenAI’s technical documentation says product-feed campaigns can also use the system, although that capability remains in beta.
It is the latest stage in the rapid construction of a full advertising stack around ChatGPT. The platform already supports CPM and conventional CPC campaigns, self-service campaign management, product feeds, reporting and an advertiser API. Conversion performance can be measured through a browser pixel or a server-to-server Conversions API, with OpenAI recommending the latter as the more reliable source.
That makes this more than the addition of another advertising objective. It gives OpenAI the machinery to connect conversational intent with commercial outcomes – and to optimise that connection continuously.
Is ChatGPT now a retail media network?
Not quite, at least under the strict definition of retail media. A conventional retail media network monetises a retailer’s owned audiences, shopping environments and first-party transactional data. ChatGPT is neither the merchant nor, in most cases, the owner of the eventual transaction. Its ads therefore sit more naturally within commerce media, alongside search, social and other platforms capable of influencing a purchase without necessarily completing it.
Nevertheless, ChatGPT is moving directly into retail media’s competitive territory. People frequently use the chatbot to research categories, describe problems, compare products and narrow down choices. That gives OpenAI something potentially richer than a search keyword: the context surrounding the decision. A customer might explain their budget, household circumstances, preferred brands, product constraints and intended use during the same conversation.
OpenAI says ads appear below, and remain separate from, ChatGPT’s answers. Delivery can consider the current conversation, the advertiser’s creative and landing page, contextual hints and, where the user has enabled ad personalisation, selected signals from their wider ChatGPT activity. Ads are not currently shown to Plus, Pro or Business users, nor to anyone known or predicted to be under 18. The platform remains in beta, and OpenAI acknowledges that it does not yet have reliable performance benchmarks across advertisers or sectors.
Even so, conversion optimisation changes its commercial proposition. Instead of selling proximity to a conversation about running shoes, televisions or holidays, OpenAI can now sell the likelihood that the person having that conversation will subsequently buy one.
Competition for the “messy middle”
For retailers, the immediate danger is not necessarily that ChatGPT replaces their retail media networks, rather that it captures more of the discovery and consideration process before shoppers arrive on retailer websites.
Retailers increasingly depend on sponsored search, product recommendations and display advertising across their own digital properties. If customers use ChatGPT to build a shortlist, compare features and select a product before clicking through, they may arrive much closer to purchase. That could reduce browsing, searches and product-page views – and therefore the volume of onsite retail media inventory available to sell.
It also gives brands another way to reach shoppers without buying access through a retailer. A manufacturer with ecommerce capability could upload its product feed, advertise against relevant conversations and send customers directly to its own website. That places ChatGPT in competition for performance budgets that might otherwise have gone to Amazon, Walmart, Tesco or another retailer network.
OpenAI’s partnerships indicate that this competition will also involve collaboration. Its advertising ecosystem already includes agency groups Dentsu, Omnicom, Publicis and WPP, alongside technology providers including Adobe, Criteo, Kargo, Pacvue and StackAdapt. This makes ChatGPT advertising accessible through parts of the same infrastructure already used to manage commerce and retail media campaigns. OpenAI opened its self-service Ads Manager in May, following an initial direct-sales pilot.
Retailers can therefore use ChatGPT as an acquisition channel themselves, promoting products, services and seasonal ranges when conversations indicate relevant intent. For retail media networks, there may also eventually be an opportunity to combine retailer audiences and transaction data with ChatGPT inventory, turning it into another offsite activation channel.
Retail media retains an important advantage
ChatGPT still lacks retail media’s most defensible asset: direct knowledge of what customers bought across online and physical stores.
Conversion pixels and APIs can show that an action followed an ad click, but retailers possess product-level transactions, loyalty histories, margins, stock availability and, increasingly, in-store sales attribution. That closed-loop evidence remains extremely valuable to advertisers.
The dividing line is therefore becoming clearer. ChatGPT can understand why somebody might buy and influence what enters their consideration set. Retail media can prove what they eventually purchased.
For now, OpenAI is building a new commerce-media channel rather than a retail media network. But conversion optimisation means it is no longer competing only for attention. It is competing for sales – and for the advertising budgets attached to them.
