# Chatbot ads are here, and the ad company may get your whole conversation

> OpenAI has 100,000+ advertisers in ChatGPT. An ad startup serving 200 smaller AI apps says AI-written ads get double the clicks, and it sees the full chat.

- URL: https://devisdead.ai/news/chatbot-ads-are-here-and-the-ad-company-may-get-your-whole-conversation
- Published: 2026-11-06T01:22:38Z
- Author: DevIsDead Newsroom
- Section: AI
- Tags: advertising, chatbots, privacy, openai
- Originally reported by WIRED (https://www.wired.com/story/ads-in-chatbots-have-arrived-heres-whats-working-and-whats-not/).

Ads in AI chatbots have gone from rumor to rollout, and how they get picked deserves a developer's attention, mostly because of what the ad system gets to read.

[WIRED's Paresh Dave](https://www.wired.com/story/ads-in-chatbots-have-arrived-heres-whats-working-and-whats-not/) spoke with Koah Labs, a San Francisco ad-tech startup that says it puts ads into more than 200 AI apps, including DeepAI and Liner. When Koah is asked to show an ad, it usually gets everything the user has said in the chat so far.

## Where the market stands

The big players have split. OpenAI says more than 100,000 customers have advertised in ChatGPT since ads launched there in February. Google, meanwhile, spent last week bringing ads in AI Mode, its search chatbot, to 10 countries beyond the US. Anthropic, per WIRED, is holding to its pledge to keep Claude ad-free, and its recent IPO filing didn't mention ads at all.

Koah is far smaller, with about a tenth of OpenAI's advertisers, but CEO Nic Baird has numbers on what's working:

- Ads written partly by AI get double the clicks of fully human-written ones, he says.
- About 3% of ads get clicked, roughly level with Google's mature search ads.
- Chatbot prompts run at least twice as long as Google queries, which gives the ad picker more to work with.

## The context problem

Search queries ask for facts. People treat chatbots as confidants. A system that sees the prompt, the AI's answer and the rest of the conversation can target far more precisely than a search box. That's the pitch, and also the problem.

Baird says Koah anonymizes the queries it gets and stores them de-identified, and declined to say more about collection or storage. He also talks about repeating ads to the same user, and using details from the chat to tailor the page you land on after a click.

There's a support angle too. Koah estimates a quarter of chatbot questions about a brand are really support requests, such as returns and exchanges, and expects companies to buy ads aimed at those unhappy customers.

## Reality check

Even the people selling these ads aren't sure yet. Regulated advertisers such as drugmakers keep tighter human control over their ads and get weaker results. DeepAI's CEO Kevin Baragona says ad revenue has been meaningful, but he isn't committed to it. His verdict: "I don't think the ads are working terribly well for anyone."

If you're building an AI app and weighing ads, the first question isn't the click rate. It's what you're willing to send to a third party every time someone asks your bot something personal.

**[Scoreboard](/scoreboard) update:** Draw. Chatbot ads click like search ads, but even their sellers aren't sure users will accept the privacy cost.

Stay undead.