Adthena finds ChatGPT ads hit 204,489 placements before the holidays

What changed

Adthena counted 204,489 placements of ChatGPT ads between June and September 2026, the search intelligence company said on 4 November 2026 in its Holiday AI Paid Search Report. The advertiser base grew nearly 6x in two months, and Adthena’s report page counts 6,333 distinct brands running ChatGPT ads in August, up from 1,082 in June.

Apparel, consumer electronics and travel drove about 95% of the ChatGPT placements Adthena tracked. Toys and games grew fastest, with 13x advertiser growth from June to August, the steepest of the five categories on Adthena’s report page.

Adthena found many ChatGPT ads on early-stage research queries, asked before a shopper is ready to buy:

Beauty had 83% of its ChatGPT ads on those research queries, travel 69% and toys and games 67%.

Adthena also counted 175,100 paid placements inside Google’s AI answers in the US, concentrated in apparel and consumer electronics. Apparel alone took 111,000 placements inside Google AI Overviews and AI Mode panels in the US. Phillip Thune, CEO of Adthena, said: “A year ago, there was one place to buy search ads that mattered during the holidays. Now there are three.”

Google AI Overviews appeared more often in every market Adthena tracks, from August 2025 to August 2026:

Australia’s AI Overview appearances rose 536%, from 22 million to 139 million, against 160% in the UK and EU and 89% in the US.

Why it happened

Adthena counts ChatGPT ads from zero, from the point OpenAI began selling advertising in ChatGPT, while Google has opened paid slots inside its AI answers in steps since May 2025. Google’s roundup of Google Marketing Live 2025 on 21 May 2025 said ads in AI Overviews would reach more countries in English, and that Google was testing ad formats in and below AI Mode responses in the US.

On 20 May 2026, Google began testing new ad formats built with Gemini, one of which puts a relevant ad on the list of recommendations AI Mode gives a shopper who is researching. On 28 October 2026, Google expanded ads in AI Mode to 10 more countries, among them Australia and Canada, and wrote that sponsored and organic product list items in AI Mode already get similar click-through rates.

What it changes for GEO

Ads in ChatGPT and Google’s AI answers now sit at the research stage, where a buyer asks how to get something done and the answer recommends one solution and the business behind it. That recommendation is the most valuable moment in the purchase, and Adthena found 83% of beauty ads in ChatGPT on those research queries.

Buying the ad leaves the answer unchanged. A ChatGPT ad sits under the answer on a separate system, and Google’s help page on ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode says paid ads have no effect on organic AI answers, made by the ranking systems that decide which pages Google AI Overviews show. A brand that buys only the ad pays to sit under a rival’s recommendation.

US e-commerce brands gain first, because buyers can click and buy their products from the answer. Apparel, consumer electronics and travel took about 95% of Adthena’s ChatGPT placements, and its 175,100 US placements in Google’s AI answers cluster in the first two. A shop there that the answer recommends can add an ad under its own name, in Australia too since Google’s AI Mode ads expansion. B2B manufacturers and service firms come later.

Brands that the answer leaves out or describes wrongly lose. A wrong price or an old product name in the answer costs the sale, and an ad under it corrects nothing. A site whose robots.txt, CDN or host firewall blocks AI crawlers drops out of those engines’ answers, and the same block stops ChatGPT ads from running.

Each engine answers from its own sources, so a brand checks each engine. ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity share only 2 of their top 10 cited sources when answering the same questions about the same brand, according to Agenzy’s 2026 source study (n=109 business projects).

What to do

The head of e-commerce should have the team record which brands ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews recommend for its 10 most important category questions, before any holiday budget moves into ads in AI answers. The team asks each question in both engines the way a researching shopper would, and notes the brands named, the prices quoted and the sources cited.

Next, the web team confirms robots.txt, the CDN and the host firewall let AI crawlers read the site. A shop that both engines recommend then tests ChatGPT ads and Google’s ads in AI answers against that record, and a shop they leave out works on getting cited in ChatGPT answers first.

To check the result, the team reruns the questions weekly and asks every new customer how they found the company, because analytics undercount buyers who met the brand in an AI answer, as measuring AI search revenue explains.