ChatGPT Ads: When the Answer Becomes the Ad Slot

For twenty years the arrangement held: Google shows ten links, the paid ones on top. Now the ad space is moving into the assistant, to the place where the answer is written in the first place.

What changes with it is the volume. A results page has room for twenty hits. An AI answer names three providers, often only two. A business missing from it never reaches that customer at all, and there is no second page to check. The few slots get expensive accordingly.

Read as a budget question, this leads you astray. Ads and citations draw on the same material: verifiable facts about price, service and availability, properly marked up. Without that material you pay for visibility you would otherwise have been given for free. With it your name is in the answer already, and the paid placement becomes a bonus.