OpenAI’s countdown: monetization, ads, and a Google-shaped threat

And the clock is ticking. 

Google is now clearly fully dialed into building the infrastructure needed to monetize what happens when the internet becomes chat: Gemini embedded into search ads re-architected for conversational intent and the plumbing being laid for a world where queries look more like prompts than keywords. The head start OpenAI had in 2025 while Google’s attention was diverted by two antitrust cases, is arguably gone. One case is now in the rearview mirror and the other — set to be decided this year — appears increasingly likely to land with narrower remedies than once feared. That shift has freed Google to move faster. What once looked like a durable advantage for OpenAI now looks more like a temporary one, and in advertising, temporary advantages have a way of disappearing fast.

It’s understood OpenAI isn’t actively talking to advertisers about advertising — at least not yet.

“We’re actually trying to cut a deal with OpenAI on behalf of one of our publisher clients right now, with our Magnify team and struggling,” said Matt Prohaska, CEO and principal of Prohaska Consulting.

One more exec noted that despite reaching out to OpenAI in early 2025, they got no response. Another is still trying to pencil in something for early 2026.

“The longer OpenAI waits to launch advertising, the more I think ‘what are they cooking up?,’” said Sonata Insights’ founder and chief analyst Debra Aho Williamson. “They’ve got to be thinking of something that’s really revolutionary. They’re not just going to come out with ads next to search results.”

The contrast is telling. Google is already in market, talking to advertisers about what ads look like inside its AI assistant Gemini. OpenAI, by comparison, has been conspicuously quiet about advertising inside ChatGPT. That silence may be strategic. It may also be a risk. 

Go Fish’s president, David Dweck, said he’s had a lot of those conversations with Google last summer. 

“We wanted to help our brands get better set up for the future of ads in their AI ecosystem,” he said. “We got far enough down the path to really understand that they’re [Google] going to look at it similarly to how they rolled out ads on Google, or at least ensure the brands that show up and appear and are winning it first will be the brands that are hyper relevant in the first place, organically.”

It would be wrong to say OpenAI is ignorant to Google’s advances. It wouldn’t have hired Fidji Simo as CEO of applications last August if it was. Nor would it have hired former Slack CEO Denise Dresser (chief revenue officer), former TikTok lawyer Christina MacDonald (lead counsel for ads and shopping in ChatGPT) or former Google exec Albert Lee (vp, corporate development). But it does feel like it’s in flux as evidenced by CEO Sam Altman’s internal “code red” declaration on Dec. 1, to combat the rising threat of Google and other AI competitors toward ChatGPT. Refocusing efforts on ChatGPT, however, meant de-prioritizing efforts across its other initiatives, including ads.

Whether the company can afford to move the timeline for ads for too long remains debatable. OpenAI expects to burn through $115 billion through 2029, before it finally turns a profit in 2030, according to The Information — resulting from the projected $450 billion it needs to pay to rent servers from cloud providers. Ads are a way to offset at least some of that. 

“The financial pressure is real,” said Basis’ strategic business outcomes partner Robert Kurtz. “OpenAI remains (highly) unprofitable and needs new revenue streams to sustain its massive compute costs. Ads are the most scalable way to monetize hundreds of millions of users.”

When ads do arrive, ChatGPT is expected to be the first surface. The logic is straightforward. The app has already reached an average of 910 million monthly active users, according to Sensor Tower data. By comparison, Google’s Gemini has seen a 125% year-over-year increase in users to 345 million, per Sensor Tower.

“When you isolate queries with actual commercial intent, ChatGPT is realistically sitting at low single-digit percentages of Google’s query volume (sub-1% to maybe 3% at best),” said Collective Measures’ group director of performance media, Lauren Beerling. “That alone shapes how advertisers will think about OpenAI ads out of the gate.”

There is also a cautionary tale playing out elsewhere. Perplexity’s early ad product, built around CPMs rather than traditional search CPCs, landed poorly with buyers. Meetings were hard to secure, enthusiasm harder still. The company has since dialed back its ad ambitions to focus on its Comet browser. Yes, OpenAI has more leverage than Perplexity ever did. But leverage alone doesn’t define the outcome. The longer it waits to decide what kind of advertising company it wants to be, the more the market may decide for it. 

“Control and data — that’s what advertisers always want,” said Brainlabs’ chief solutions officer Jeremy Hull. “And performance (that I can verify within my own source of truth) and insights. They’ll have to test [ads] very, very carefully, because they’re in a very different situation than Google.”

Simo said as much when interviewed about her vision for ChatGPT. For OpenAI to ever consider ads, they need to ensure the commerce experience is top notch and data privacy is handled well, but sensitively. And the team is already laying the groundwork.

Since September 2025, OpenAI announced partnerships with Walmart (October 2025), Target (November 2025) and Instacart (December 2025), while adding Shopify and Etsy merchant integrations for sellers (September 2025) — demonstrating early iterations of that stellar commerce proposition Simo is thriving for.

“The commerce angle is interesting because if you think about Amazon as a commerce engine, Amazon existed for many years without advertising,” Williamson said. “It didn’t launch advertising early on, it focused on building commerce. It created those relationships and established its infrastructure. Then it layered on advertising and became a super successful ad business almost overnight.”

Last September, it was reported that Simo was already on the hunt for an exec to oversee all monetization efforts at the company, including bringing ads to ChatGPT, that’ll report to her — though names of those being considered have been kept well and truly under wraps.

The company posted a vacancy for a San-Francisco based growth paid marketing platform engineer, responsible for building and scaling systems that power OpenAI’s marketing channels and spend efficiency — AKA an ads platform.

And while it’s not directly related to ChatGPT ads, OpenAI’s recent $1 billion licensing deal with Disney lays the groundwork for formats and content types that could ultimately feed into a broader ad ecosystem across its apps.

“They have to be a lot closer [to launching an ad platform] than it might seem, and they should be,” said Dweck. “They’ve taken more of the Zuckerberg approach: move fast, break things. Ship products, quickly learn. So I would assume that they’re far closer [to having an ad business] than they’re saying.”

OpenAI did not respond to Digiday’s request for comment.