Hi everyone,

Last week OpenAI emailed me: ChatGPT Ads Manager is now open to advertisers in the Middle East, including Turkey, where I work. A few days earlier it had been the first item in a client meeting, and I listed my reservations then. Since then the industry tone has moved to "great new channel, get in early."

The channel is real. But four things sit at the bottom of every pitch deck.

Grab a coffee.

ChatGPT ads bring a third model to advertising. Google showed us what people search for. Meta showed us what they're interested in. ChatGPT shows what they're trying to get done right now. That's a powerful signal. But before you fund it, answer four questions: who sees the ad (answer: people who don't pay for ChatGPT), how the ad gets chosen (context, not keywords), which data claim is true (neither of the two you'll hear, and there's a setting you should switch off), and what the technical gate is (four separate bots, and most teams block all of them at once). Go in without these and your first month's budget is tuition.

The most important sentence of the week is the least repeated one. According to OpenAI's own help centre:

That has two consequences.

🎯 Media planning. If you sell to businesses, your decision-maker probably has a Business seat or pays for Plus. Either way, they will never see your ad. The people who pay most for AI sit outside this inventory. The channel fits consumer offers and low-to-mid ticket purchases far better.

⚖️ Ethics. When ad-free becomes a product feature, the ad load falls on people who can't pay. That's been the ad model since television, but advertisers should decide knowing it.

🌍 This is where the non-US view matters. The Free tier carries far more weight in emerging markets like Turkey, so the income skew of this inventory is sharper outside America. I haven't seen one US-based analysis look at it from this angle.

The same need reads very differently in Google and in ChatGPT:

No keywords, yet the need is completely clear. That's the channel's potential.

OpenAI picks ads using the conversation, your landing page and copy, and signals it calls context hints.

A context hint is not a keyword list. It will be the most common mistake early advertisers make. Take the second example:

❌ pet insurance, dog insurance, vet costs, cat insurance

✅ "Owners of ageing dogs or cats who are worried about unexpected vet costs and want to secure treatment expenses in advance."

It should answer three questions: what do you offer, who is it useful for, and in what situation.

Critically, a context hint is not a targeting rule. You can't guarantee appearing whenever a given sentence is typed. For teams used to exact match, that's the hardest shift.

You'll hear two sentences. Both are wrong.

❌ "Your ChatGPT conversations are being sold to advertisers." No. Conversations aren't shared with advertisers and data isn't sold; advertisers see aggregated reporting. The ad system is also separate from the system that writes answers. You can't pay to change ChatGPT's answer or make it recommend your product. Ads sit below the answer, clearly labelled.

❌ "The ads don't use your data at all." Also wrong. Selection is built on the context of the current conversation. With personalisation on, broader signals can be used too.

✅ The truth in between: the ad system and the data pipeline are separate systems, but they live inside the same box.

Barış Özcan, one of Turkey's best-known tech communicators, just published a video that isn't about ads but explains OpenAI's approach well. It builds on 404 Media's September report: some ChatGPT conversations are read and scored by human contractors. Your username isn't shown and personal information is filtered, but the company admits the filter can miss some of it. Some chats carry a memory summary on top: what you've used ChatGPT for, sometimes where you live. Nothing explains how conversations are selected.

His closing line puts it well: typing "keep this between us" at the end of a chat changes nothing. Switching off the setting does.

On deletion: a deleted chat leaves the system within 30 days, but if it had already entered the training pool, it stays there. And this isn't only OpenAI. Google does the same human review and says so in Gemini's privacy notice. The difference is that the information sits in a help page, not on the screen you use every day.

Most teams treat this as one decision: "we blocked the AI bots." It's four.

The core distinction: to appear in LLM answers, keep the access bots open. If you don't want your content training the model, block the training bot. They aren't alternatives. robots.txt manages them independently:

The common trap: a wildcard. A broad Disallow under User-agent: *, or Cloudflare's "block AI bots" toggle, closes all four at once. As we saw last week, Cloudflare's Bot Preference Sync only offers three categories (Search, Agent, Training) and no per-bot rules.

On OAI-AdsBot: it only visits pages submitted as ads, its data isn't used for training, and there's no published IP list, so you can't verify a visit in your logs is genuine.

The full deck for this issue, built in NotebookLM: open it here.

Not industry data. A recorded conversation. Last week, the first item in a weekly client meeting was ChatGPT ads: "What do we know, should we test it?" My answers:

The most striking line from the client side wasn't about ads: "I'm wary of even uploading a photo of myself or my family." The real feeling at the table was trust. No dashboard measures it, but it will set this channel's ceiling in markets like mine.

Don't open an account. Fill in four boxes. It takes half an hour.

And one personal, ten-minute job: in your own account, go to Settings → Data controls → "Improve the model for everyone" and turn it off. Tell your team and your family too. When they write something sensitive, they should use temporary chat.

If you test, use one problem sentence, one landing page and a trial budget. In a beta system, month one is learning.

🔍 Search Console's new "Multimodal" filter measures the camera, not AI. On 24 September Google split the Web search type into Text-based and Multimodal. The Multimodal bucket covers Lens, Circle to Search, image uploads and Chrome's "Search this image", not AI Mode or AI Overviews. It isn't new traffic either; it's a split, not an addition. There's no query dimension. I tested it: an API request with searchType=MULTIMODAL returned HTTP 400 as of 25 September, so you can't pull it into a dashboard yet. Do this week: open the filter and write down the last three months with the date, so you have a baseline. (Google Search Central)

📊 ChatGPT ads went from 3% to 47% of gaming chats. Comscore's Q2 report shows the share of tracked conversations containing an ad rising between March and June: gaming and consoles 3% to 47%, toys and hobbies 5% to 24%, books, music and video 9% to 22%. Don't overread it: US desktop only, an opt-in panel, it counts conversations (not impressions), and it's unclear whether ad-free plans are in the denominator. Comscore itself calls the rise a preliminary observation. (Search Engine Journal, 23 Sept)

The most discussed part of this channel is the least important. You'll learn context hints and bidding in three weeks.

The part you won't learn from a tutorial is this: who's in this inventory, and at what moment you're stepping in. Because ad-free is a product feature, this inventory is made of people who don't pay for ChatGPT. And they don't use it like a search box. They use it like someone to talk to. Some ask for recipes, some ask about loans, some write there instead of going to a therapist.

Reaching people's most private moments and putting ads there will carry a cost later. Today there's no regulation, no public backlash, no lawsuit. All three will come. Advertising history always runs this way: the inventory opens first, the lines are drawn later, and when they're drawn, the earliest entrants do the most explaining. So make sure the step you take today is one you could defend in three years, in a courtroom or an interview.

On Google, an ad sat next to a list of results. Here, an ad steps into a conversation. The industry hasn't taken that difference seriously yet.

So, a question: do you know whether your last ten clients use ChatGPT on a paid or a free plan?

If you don't, you don't know whether this channel fits you either.

And if you run paid media outside the US, tell me which plan your buyers are on. I'm building a picture of who this inventory actually reaches, and right now nobody has it.

See you next week. Take care.

Mert Erkal

I genuinely enjoy sharing what's moving in SEO and AI search with you every week. If you find the work useful, you can keep it going by buying me a coffee. ☕ Click 'Buy Me a Coffee' to contribute to the knowledge-sharing. Let's build more together.

Mert Erkal is the founder of Stradiji. Since 2010, he has advised enterprise brands on SEO, generative engine optimization (GEO) and conversion optimization. Based in Istanbul, he works remotely with clients in the U.S., the U.K., Australia and Turkey. He writes the weekly newsletter The SEOs Diners Club.