AI & Search Advertising

OpenAI's entry into advertising moved from rumor to reality this week, with ChatGPT ads confirmed live and the company explicitly targeting small and medium-sized businesses — the high-volume, high-margin segment that has been Google and Meta's most reliable revenue engine for over a decade. The strategic logic is clear: ChatGPT's query volume gives OpenAI a direct-response advertising surface that didn't exist 18 months ago, and SMBs are notoriously price-sensitive and quick to follow performance. The hard part, as AdExchanger noted, is building the measurement, attribution, and brand safety infrastructure that advertisers will demand before scaling spend. Separately, Zoom's decision to partner with creators specifically to boost its visibility in AI search results signals a new front in SEO strategy — one where human-generated, authoritative content is being weaponized to influence AI answer engines. Brands are simultaneously trying to suppress negative content from AI citations and amplify positive signals, creating an entirely new reputation management discipline that is outpacing existing measurement tools.