The Ad That Appears Inside the Answer: What ChatGPT Ads Tell Us About Discovery

In March 2026, Criteo became the first ad-tech company to integrate with OpenAI's advertising pilot inside ChatGPT. By June of the same year, the program had scaled to over 2,000 brands. The performance data that accompanied this update was more notable than the headline: click-through rates two to three times higher than comparable ad formats elsewhere, conversion rates that outperform other referral channels, and — the most telling figure — more than 80% of ad-driven ChatGPT traffic comes from new customers.

Why New Customers Is the Number That Matters

Most digital advertising runs on retargeting and remarketing logic: reaching people who already know the brand, visited the site, abandoned the cart. It's efficient because intent is warm and targeting is precise. But it's structurally limited — you're circling the same pool of already-aware consumers. The metric that tells you a channel is reaching genuinely new audiences is the new customer rate. At over 80%, ChatGPT ads are not a remarketing tool. They are a discovery mechanism.

This matters because the dominant problem for most brands — especially smaller businesses — isn't retention. It's acquisition. Reaching someone who has never heard of you, earning a click in a single impression, and converting that click to a first purchase: that is the hard part. Channels that reliably deliver new audiences at commercially viable costs are the ones worth building into your media mix early.

What ChatGPT Ads Actually Look Like — And Why They Convert

Criteo's Prompt Smart Ads capability automatically generates optimized ad creatives and product descriptions tailored to the specific context of the consumer's query. A user asking ChatGPT about the best moisturizer for sensitive skin sees a product recommendation structured to answer their actual question — not a banner pulled from a retargeting pool. The ad appears inside the logic of a conversation the user initiated, with a specific need and a specific intent.

This is structurally different from every prior ad format. Search ads appear next to results — the user knows they're scanning. Social ads interrupt a feed — the user knows they're being pushed to. An ad that appears as part of the answer to a specific question carries a different weight. The conversion logic is closer to a recommendation than an advertisement. That distinction is why click-through rates are running two to three times higher than comparable environments.

The Signal for Saudi and Gulf Brands

The current ChatGPT Ads inventory through Criteo is live in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea. The Gulf is not in this list yet. But the strategic signal doesn't require your geography to be included to be worth reading. A 2026 finding showing that 68% of US Google searches now end without a click to any website is directionally identical to what ChatGPT adoption is producing: the AI gives the answer, and the brand that appears inside that answer gets the traffic.

The ad channel that puts you inside the answer to a specific question is the one most brands would have designed if they could.

The question worth asking now — before ChatGPT Ads expands to the Gulf — is not 'should I advertise on this?' It's: 'is my brand's product information structured in a way that AI recommendation systems can accurately represent it?' When your product appears in an AI-generated answer, the creative is generated by the system. What you control is the quality, completeness, and accuracy of your catalog data, your product descriptions, and your brand positioning. The brands entering ChatGPT's ad environment with high-quality structured data will consistently outperform those that enter with the same visual budget but poor information architecture.