ChatGPT Ads has been moving fast since it launched, and this latest round of updates might be the most telling one yet. Not because of what’s changed on the surface, but because of what OpenAI is quietly saying about its own platform underneath it…

What actually changed

The latest update from OpenAI’s ChatGPT Ads introduces automated bidding, along with the addition of view-through conversions. Automated bidding is a bid strategy that hands the decision over to the AI itself, which decides whether to bid in a given auction based on whether it predicts that impression will lead to a click or a conversion.

The new “Maximise Results” strategy is designed to squeeze the best possible outcome out of whatever budget you set, rather than you having to guess the right bid yourself.

On the surface, this sounds like a genuine leap forward for advertising on ChatGPT. Strangely, though, the two additions don’t actually work together.

The contradiction nobody’s talking about

The view-through conversion metric is the kind of thing that makes you feel good when you see it. Right now, that’s all it’s doing.

When it actually comes to spending your money, the view-through conversion is ignored completely. It doesn’t factor into any bidding decisions, and it isn’t counted when working out your cost per sale either.

OpenAI has given us the data, so we can see it’s there. But when it comes to actually using that data to make decisions with our money, they hold back. So you’d have to ask yourself whether you’d build a strategy around a number OpenAI itself doesn’t trust enough to spend against.

This isn’t just an OpenAI story

Industry-wide, the big players are doing much the same thing. Microsoft is removing manual bid control from new campaigns from October, and its own language points to further removals down the line. Google Ads has spent years nudging advertisers away from manual control too, pushing them to trust its systems with budget and targeting decisions instead.

Manual control is being phased out. Automated decision-making isn’t the option anymore; it’s the default.

The real tell

What’s most interesting about this update has nothing to do with the changes themselves.

OpenAI brought in an outside company, WorkMagic, to plug into ChatGPT Ads and check its numbers independently. WorkMagic is a multichannel measurement and analytics platform that specialises in media mix modelling and multi-touch attribution. Thanks to the integration, advertisers can now see ChatGPT Ads performance sitting alongside their other channels in one dashboard, rather than pulling the numbers out manually and comparing by hand.

It’s a strange move to let outsiders check your own homework if you’re genuinely confident in it. It feels more like an effort to have someone else vouch for the product before a serious budget gets committed to it.

That single decision says more about how much OpenAI trusts its own reporting than any feature announcement does.

What we’d recommend

Given all this, we wouldn’t take ChatGPT’s reported numbers at face value just yet. Run your own tests on the platform before deciding anything. Target by region as granularly as you can, pause it in some areas, keep it live in others, and see what actually shifts. Because of how ChatGPT ads work, the journey from ad to conversion tends to be longer, and it may well end in a sale through a completely different channel days later. This needs time to play out properly.

None of this is a reason to avoid ChatGPT Ads. Depending on your industry, being an early adopter here could be a real win, and it’s definitely worth testing. But until OpenAI trusts its own numbers enough to bid on them, we wouldn’t build a budget around them either.

Treat it the way you’d treat any new platform. We saw the same thing with TikTok Ads in its early days, promising but unproven at first. Over time, the platform should mature into something more reliable and better matched to what advertisers actually need.

If exploring ChatGPT Ads, or PPC advertising more generally, is something you’d like to do, drop us an email and let’s talk.