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Marketing & Growth

Should founders advertise inside AI platforms like ChatGPT?

ChatGPT ads went from a $200K enterprise pilot to open self-serve with no minimum spend in under three months of 2026, and roughly a fifth of ChatGPT queries carry commercial intent, so early CPCs on high-intent conversations look attractive. But attribution is immature, results are unproven at scale, and Perplexity walked away from ads entirely over trust concerns, so treat it as a small experimental line, not a Meta replacement. Watch it closely: being early on a new high-intent channel is historically where small advertisers win.

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19 resources.

More in Ads & Performance Marketing

How do founders use AI to generate and test ad creatives at scale? 18 → Why use AI for audience research, copy variants, and campaign analysis? 19 → What are real examples of small teams running big-league paid campaigns with AI? 18 → Which AI tools should a founder actually put in their first ad stack? 18 → How do founders create AI UGC and avatar video ads without a creator budget? 19 → Should founders let Meta, Google, and TikTok's AI automation run their campaigns? 16 → How do founders use AI to research competitor ads and find winning angles? 17 → How much should founders budget for ad testing, and when should they kill or scale a creative? 18 → When do AI-generated ads backfire, and how do founders avoid the AI slop trap? 17 → How do founders use AI to build and optimize landing pages that convert ad clicks? 18 → How do founders use AI to measure what is actually working across channels? 16 → How are Indian D2C brands and startups using AI in performance marketing? 16 → What new AI-driven ad channels and media-buying agents should founders watch beyond Meta and Google? 17 →

Also in Starting Up

The same ground, over in Grow & market, our Starting Up track.

What growth metrics should I actually track as an early-stage startup? 3 → Should I even be running paid ads at this stage? 2 →
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →