Big Budgets and Bigger Blind Spots

What happens when big brands claw their way into AI Search results? 

The part Google quietly forgot 

One of the more satisfying things about AI search is that it doesn't particularly care how much money a brand has. Last week, searching Google for sustainably produced t-shirts surfaced four sponsored results above the fold and four below it, across three pages - all from high-street names I'd either never visited or had clicked and left fairly quickly, because they weren't what I was looking for. The budget was clearly there. The relevance wasn’t. 

The same search run as a prompt in ChatGPT returned five smaller brands and two of them were spot on. 

This is what a scattergun approach looks like from the receiving end: not precision, no nuance - just enough money to be everywhere and enough indifference to not bother filtering out the people who obviously aren't interested. It wastes the user's time, it wastes the client's budget, and it quietly edges out smaller, more relevant businesses that actually deserve to be found. 

AI doesn't hand positions to the highest bidder. It finds the best fit. That's not a small distinction - it's the entire point.  

So naturally, the ads are coming 

ChatGPT began trialling advertising in February this year and has since introduced a cost-per-click model. Ads sit below the AI's response in clearly labelled sponsored blocks. The targeting mechanism is genuinely interesting: rather than matching keywords or demographic segments, ads are served based on the semantic meaning of the full conversation. The AI reads context, not just the words in a single query. 

In practice, a context-aware ad should be a more useful one. If someone's spent five messages talking about sustainable fashion, a well-matched result from an ethical clothing brand isn't the worst thing in the world. 

The entry price 

The reported minimum budget to advertise on ChatGPT is a commitment of $200,000+. This makes the above a fairly moot point, because the brands in a position to meet that threshold are almost certainly the same ones currently buying up every keyword on Google with the enthusiasm of someone who has never once had to justify a media plan to another human being. 

So the scenario being constructed is one where AI does the sophisticated work of understanding what someone actually wants, and then potentially surfaces a result that's there because it had the deepest pockets rather than the best answer. It's a familiar model. It just feels a bit worse when it's dressed up as something smarter. 

Where this ends up 

Advertising finds its way into every channel eventually - that's not cynicism, it's just pattern recognition. But AI search works precisely because it isn't doing what Google does. The moment the sponsored result starts blurring into the organic one, something fairly fundamental has gone wrong, and the argument for using it over a regular search engine gets noticeably thinner. 

For now, the relevance is still there. It'd be a shame to watch it get quietly buried under someone else's media budget.