If recent leaks are to be believed, ChatGPT is poised to introduce ads into its platform. And CEO Sam Altman’s comments about ads in ChatGPT from a while ago could provide clues into what they could look like.
In a conversation from a few months ago, OpenAI Sam Altman had offered an assessment of how advertising could—and perhaps more importantly, couldn’t—work in ChatGPT. His remarks struck at the heart of a fundamental tension in the tech industry: the delicate balance between monetization and user trust. What made his comments particularly striking was his pointed critique of Google’s search model, suggesting that the very success of traditional search advertising depends on a kind of strategic imperfection.
Altman began by questioning the foundational economics of search advertising: “There is a question of why ads on a Google search are dependent on Google doing badly. If it was giving you the best answer, there’d be no reason ever to buy an ad above it. So that thing is not quite aligned with me.”
He contrasted this with ChatGPT’s positioning: “ChatGPT, maybe it gives you the best answer, maybe it doesn’t. It’s at least trying to give you the best answer. And that has led to people having a deep and pretty trusting relationship with ChatGPT. You ask ChatGPT for the best hotel, not Google or something else.”
It was here that Altman drew his red line. “If ChatGPT were accepting payment to put a worse hotel above a better hotel, that’s probably catastrophic for your relationship with ChatGPT,” he warned. The word “catastrophic” wasn’t hyperbole in his telling—it represented an existential threat to the trust that OpenAI had carefully cultivated with its users.
But Altman wasn’t ruling out monetization entirely. He sketched out what he saw as an acceptable alternative: “On the other hand, if ChatGPT shows you its guess of the best hotel, whatever that is, and then if you book it with one click takes the same cut that it would take from any other hotel and there’s nothing that influenced it, but there’s some sort of transaction fee, I think that’s probably okay.”
Altman’s vision suggests a model closer to affiliate commerce than traditional search ads—a hands-off transaction fee rather than paid placement. Yet the tech landscape has shifted considerably since Altman made these remarks. Google has introduced AI Overviews into search results, blurring the lines between organic answers and advertising opportunities. Perplexity AI has also launched an advertising program that it insists doesn’t compromise answer quality, instead placing ads alongside responses. The pressure to monetize is immense, and the challenge for OpenAI will be whether it can maintain the philosophical purity Altman articulated—or whether the realities of running a company reportedly burning billions annually will force compromises that users might view as, in his own words, catastrophic.