The Tech TL;DR: ChatGPT Advertising Deployment

• B2B Dominance: Business software made up nearly 20% of ad impressions on ChatGPT from March to August, followed by professional services at 8.5% and developer tools at 4.6%.
• Targeting Efficiency: Graphite reported that user click-through rates more than doubled between late March and early September, though less than half of ad-eligible users have seen an ad.
• Revenue Milestone: OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar announced at a Goldman Sachs conference in early September that the company’s annual run-rate revenue has crossed the $1 billion mark.

SaaS Vendors and Developer Tools Fill the Impression Queue

OpenAI launched advertisements on its primary AI service in February, working to establish a predictable revenue stream ahead of a planned initial public offering scheduled for the following year. The system aims to serve relevant products based on the conversation context while strictly barring sensitive categories like legal services, politics, and gambling.

Data from Graphite’s Similarweb analysis shows that software platforms command the largest share of these early placements. Companies including Monday.com, HubSpot, Resume.io, and Canva appeared frequently in the rotation. Form builder site Jotform deployed over 930 distinct ad variations within a single month.

Advertiser participation showed distinct fluctuation patterns over the spring and summer. HubSpot and Canva ran concentrated campaigns before tapering off, while Zapier and the Wall Street Journal dropped their ad campaigns entirely by the end of August. Meanwhile, Cursor—the AI coding environment acquired earlier this year by SpaceX—maintained heavy advertising volume alongside speech generation tool Speechify.

Graphite CEO Ethan Smith noted that the heavy presence of developer tools and AI utilities makes logical sense given the user base. “It’s self-selecting people who are necessarily AI-forward,” Smith told Business Insider, explaining why tools like Cursor resonate with chatbot operators.

Scaling Infrastructure and Developing AI-Native Formats

While ad impressions lean heavily toward enterprise software, OpenAI’s internal team is still refining foundational operational layers. Speaking at a Goldman Sachs event in September, CFO Sarah Friar explained that the company is actively working through pricing models and global deployment mechanics.

“We’re starting to really see some strong outcomes for advertisers who care about performance,” Friar stated. “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.”

“I suspect that the targeting is much harder here and will probably improve much more over time and might become, perhaps, hyper-relevant,” Smith said, noting significant remaining headroom given that less than half of eligible users have encountered ads.