--- title: "ChatGPT’s New Ads Sell Software to People Who Already Buy Software" description: "A Graphite study finds one in five ChatGPT ad impressions pitches business software, like a Highway 101 billboard that learned to talk" author: "Tomasz Idle" published: 2026-09-29T12:00:01Z modified: 2026-09-29T14:12:52Z url: https://rews.cc/a/chatgpt-s-new-ads-sell-software-to-people-who-already-buy-so-7d8c8c language: en tags: ["openai", "advertising", "saas", "sam-altman", "goldman-sachs", "tech"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # ChatGPT’s New Ads Sell Software to People Who Already Buy Software *A Graphite study finds one in five ChatGPT ad impressions pitches business software, like a Highway 101 billboard that learned to talk* By Tomasz Idle · September 29, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/chatgpt-s-new-ads-sell-software-to-people-who-already-buy-so-7d8c8c ## In brief - Ads for business software made up nearly 20% of ChatGPT ad impressions from March to August, Graphite found - Business and professional services took 8.5% of impressions and developer tools 4.6% - Monday.com, HubSpot, Resume.io and Canva were top advertisers; Jotform ran 930+ ad varieties in a month - Click-through rates more than doubled from late March to early September; under half of ad-eligible users saw ads - CFO Sarah Friar said ads hit a $1 billion annual run rate, ahead of OpenAI’s planned IPO next year There is a stretch of Highway 101 in San Francisco where the billboards speak a private language. KUBERNETES, they say, or SOC 2 COMPLIANCE, or some portmanteau of a word that is itself a portmanteau. The billboards are not for you, unless you are a technology company, in which case they are for the technology company you work at, so your technology company can sell its technology. It is advertising as a closed ecosystem: plankton that advertise to other plankton. ChatGPT, invented a few miles from those billboards, has now grown its own version. A new study by the marketing agency Graphite, reported by Business Insider, finds that ads pitching business software to corporate buyers made up the single largest category of ad impressions on ChatGPT from March to August — almost 20%. Another 8.5% of impressions promoted business and professional services, and 4.6% plugged developer tools. The chatbot of the people, it turns out, mostly wants to talk to procurement departments. OpenAI began placing ads in its flagship AI service in February, part of an effort to turn the thing into a business that can support a planned initial public offering next year. The ads are supposed to be relevant to whatever the user is chatting about, and certain categories are barred — legal services, politics, gambling. What is permitted, apparently in industrial quantities, is software that sells software. ## Nine hundred and thirty ways to build a form Graphite’s report, built on Similarweb user data, reads like a yearbook of the companies that buy those Highway 101 billboards. Monday.com and HubSpot were among the advertisers that appeared most often, alongside Resume.io and Canva. Jotform, a site for building online forms, ran more than 930 varieties of ChatGPT ads in a single month, which suggests either extraordinary creativity or an automated system that has discovered the form-ad equivalent of writing the same sentence nine hundred times with different punctuation. The agency also noticed churn. HubSpot and Canva each advertised in a burst, then trailed off over the summer. Some names, like Zapier and the Wall Street Journal, dropped off entirely by the end of the reporting period — a reminder that buying ads on a chatbot is still an experiment, and experiments get cancelled. Then there is Cursor, the AI coding company acquired earlier this year by SpaceX, which advertised heavily on ChatGPT too. So did other AI-tool makers like Speechify. Graphite’s CEO, Ethan Smith, sees no mystery here: people who use one AI tool are inclined to use another. “It’s self-selecting people who are necessarily AI-forward,” he told Business Insider. The aquarium advertises filtration systems to the fish, because the fish are demonstrably interested in water. ## A billion dollars of plankton For OpenAI’s leadership there is genuine good news in the numbers. Graphite found that the click-through rate on ChatGPT ads more than doubled from late March to early September, suggesting the targeting is improving. And fewer than half of the users eligible to see ads have been served one at all. “There’s a lot of upside, or there’s a lot more reach that they can hit,” Smith said. Which is a gentle way of saying that most of the audience hasn’t seen the billboards yet, and soon will. At a Goldman Sachs conference in early September, OpenAI’s chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, said the ads business had already hit the $1 billion mark in annual run-rate revenue — while the team is still working out such minor details as pricing and global deployment. “We’re starting to really see some strong outcomes for advertisers who care about performance,” Friar said. “And this is all before we’ve really launched a format that feels truly endemic to AI. That’s what I get super excited about.” What an AI-native ad format would be is left as an exercise for the reader, and apparently for OpenAI, but Friar offered a sketch: she’d like the product to eventually be like “if Google and Meta had a baby.” Google and Meta built their ad empires on knowing an unsettling amount about their users — demographics, friendships, the things you search for at 2 a.m. A chatbot, of course, knows what you ask it, including the questions you would never type into a search bar because search bars feel public and chat boxes feel like confessionals. One can see why a CFO would daydream about that baby. Smith, for his part, thinks the targeting can only get better. “I suspect that the targeting is much harder here and will probably improve much more over time and might become, perhaps, hyper-relevant,” he said. “Hyper-relevant” is a lovely piece of marketing Esperanto. Translated into the vernacular, it means the ad will know what you were really asking about. So the picture, as of this autumn: a service pitched as a universal assistant currently pays part of its bills by showing project-management software to people asking about project management, résumé templates to people writing résumés, and AI coding tools to people already using AI. It is not surveillance advertising at Google scale, not yet. It is the 101, with a chat window instead of a windshield. The billboards of Highway 101 taught us that the surest way to make money in a gold rush is to sell picks to the pick-sellers. OpenAI has simply built the gold rush a venue where it can sell to itself, at a billion dollars a year and climbing, with nine hundred thirty kinds of form ad and room, its CFO notes, to grow.