ChatGPT ads bring 64% less revenue per visit than Google Search, study finds

A paid click from ChatGPT ads brings US shops $0.89 in revenue per visit, against $2.45 for a paid Google Search click. That 64% gap comes from a working paper by Maximilian Kaiser and Christian Schulze, published in October 2026 and still under peer review. It is the first large outside study of how ChatGPT ads perform for the brands that buy them.

Kaiser and Schulze tracked 387 advertiser sites for 60 weeks

The authors used traffic data from Grips Intelligence, which gave it for free. Kaiser is a scientific adviser to that firm. The paid panel covers 387 advertiser websites, and the organic panel 1,898 sites. Together they logged about 10 billion sessions from June 2025 to August 2026.

The design uses OpenAI’s staggered rollout. Ads went live in some countries first, while the EU had none during the study, so EU traffic served as the comparison group. ChatGPT ads now run in 89 countries, Europe included.

ChatGPT paid visitors bought at 0.37%, Google’s at 1.17%

The gap in revenue mostly comes from buying. Only 0.37% of paid ChatGPT visits ended in a purchase, compared with 1.17% for paid Google Search. The paper bases conversion and order value on 102 of the advertisers.

Organic referrals from ChatGPT held up better than many publishers feared. They fell 5.9% in the 13 weeks after ads arrived, but the range of error crosses zero. Conversion from organic ChatGPT visits stayed close to its 2.21% baseline.

Paper puts a fair ChatGPT click at $0.26, not $1.72

The authors asked what a ChatGPT click would be worth if it paid back like paid search. Their answer is about $0.26. The largest account they know of paid $1.72 per click, more than six times that figure. OpenAI has not commented on the paper.

The numbers come from early months and from outside the platform. Ad formats and targeting in ChatGPT are still changing, and agencies have said measurement gaps make ChatGPT tests hard to judge.

The gap is $1.56 per visit. On the paper’s averages, a shop that buys 10,000 visits from ChatGPT ads takes in about $8,900, while the same number of paid Google visits brings about $24,500.