A paid ChatGPT visit generated $0.89 in revenue per session for US advertisers, against $2.45 for a paid Google Search visit, a 64% shortfall, according to a working paper by e-commerce researchers Maximilian Kaiser and Christian Schulze. Business Insider reported the findings on 11 November, as OpenAI tries to turn more than 100,000 test advertisers into regular buyers.
The authors put the worth of a paid ChatGPT click, at paid search’s rate of return, at about $0.26; the largest publicly known account paid $1.72, about 6.6 times that, by our arithmetic. Set against that $1.72 click, $0.89 of revenue per session is about 52 cents of sales per $1 of click spend, also our arithmetic; the two figures come from different samples.
Business Pill · Customer Acquisition Cost Explained
An evergreen Business Engineer explainer on customer acquisition cost, the price of winning a new customer. It teaches the general idea only and does not discuss ChatGPT Ads or this study.
The key insight: As we read it, the study separates the product from the ad unit: organic ChatGPT visitors kept converting at their pre-launch rate after ads arrived, while paid ChatGPT visits brought advertisers $0.89 of revenue per session against $2.45 for paid Google Search.
The paper, titled “Can Advertising Fund Free AI?”, uses ChatGPT’s staggered international ad rollout, with the European Union untreated, and data from 1,898 online shops selling $16 billion annually. Its paid panel covers 387 advertiser websites; overall the study spans 60 weeks, from June 2025 to August 2026, and about 10 billion visitor sessions.
In US traffic, paid ChatGPT visitors converted at 0.37% versus 1.17% for paid Google Search, the authors say. Their summary is blunt: paid ChatGPT visits “perform worst among major channels, offering less than a sixth of the value for money of paid Google Search”.
The data comes from Grips Intelligence, which provided it free of charge and had no role in the research, the study page says; Kaiser serves as its scientific advisor. The page lists the paper as a working paper, with a first public version in October 2026.
Revenue per session from paid US traffic across 102 advertiser sites: $2.45 for paid Google Search and $0.89 for paid ChatGPT Ads, with conversion rates of 1.17% and 0.37%, from Kaiser and Schulze’s working paper (first version October 2026).
Ads Did Not Dent Organic Conversion
The authors also tested whether ads made ChatGPT less useful. After ads launched, organic ChatGPT referrals to shops fell by about 6 to 8%, they write: volume changed by −5.9% over the first 13 post-launch weeks, with a 95% interval of −12.6% to +1.2%.
Visitors who still arrived converted as before. Organic ChatGPT conversion changed by −0.02 percentage points from a 2.21% pre-launch baseline, with p = .648. The authors’ conclusion: “Current performance is not sufficient to finance free access costs”.
Price per paid ChatGPT click: about $0.26 at paid search’s rate of return, against the $1.72 the largest publicly known account paid, from Kaiser and Schulze’s working paper. The 6.6 times multiple is our arithmetic.
What Marketers Told Business Insider
Business Insider reported that OpenAI scaled ChatGPT Ads to a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate as of this summer; we covered OpenAI’s 100,000-advertiser milestone at the time. It cited Adthena data on 30 enterprise brands for July through September: 52% struggled to recoup their ChatGPT ad spend, while 26% matched or beat Google ads.
On the other side, Business Insider pointed to an October OpenAI case study in which Evernote found a trial-to-paid conversion rate about 10% to 20% above its historical average across paid-acquisition channels. “It’s really hard for these LLMs to find audience”, Qualcomm CMO Don McGuire told the outlet.
As we read the study, the gap sits in the paid click rather than in ChatGPT’s usefulness: paid ChatGPT visitors converted at 0.37% against 1.17% for paid search, while organic conversion changed by only −0.02 percentage points.
As we read the price data, the click price sits far from search economics: the authors put a ChatGPT click’s parity worth at about $0.26, and the largest publicly known account paid $1.72.
Kaiser and Schulze, Can Advertising Fund Free AI?
“Advertising could keep AI assistants free and make ChatGPT a Google Search competitor if advertisements do not devalue the product and justify their price.”
Three Implications
FOR ADVERTISERS Natural Intelligence has moved ChatGPT Ads from its test budget to its growth budget, Business Insider reported, and its head of strategy said reporting conversion data to the ChatGPT ad platform has been crucial.
FOR OPENAI Business Insider reported that OpenAI introduced a measurement pixel and conversion bidding, and Adthena’s CMO said Black Friday will be a big moment to watch.
FOR GOOGLE In the study, paid Google Search brought advertisers $2.45 of revenue per US session, the benchmark the authors measure ChatGPT Ads against.
The framework, written about AI subscription plans, argues: “The negative margin is not a leak. It is a procurement budget.”
As we read it, free ChatGPT access is the same kind of subsidy, and ads are one way to fund it; Kaiser and Schulze conclude that current ad performance is not sufficient to finance free access costs. The framework predates the study and does not discuss ChatGPT Ads.
What Is Not Established
The study is a working paper measured from outside the platform, using a third-party traffic panel; Business Insider described it as under review. The 52-cent figure sets a single account’s click price against an average across 102 advertisers, so it is an illustration, not a measured return for any one advertiser.
We did not contact OpenAI, the authors or Grips Intelligence. The 6.6 times and 52-cent figures are our arithmetic.
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A working paper by Kaiser and Schulze finds a paid ChatGPT visit brought US advertisers $0.89 of revenue per session, against $2.45 for paid Google Search, and puts a ChatGPT click’s parity worth at about $0.26.
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A note on sourcing. We read Kaiser and Schulze’s study page for the working paper Can Advertising Fund Free AI? (first public version, October 2026) and Business Insider’s article of 11 November 2026 in full. The Adthena, Evernote and marketer comments are as reported by Business Insider. We did not contact OpenAI, the authors or Grips Intelligence.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
