A Paid ChatGPT Visit Earns $0.89. A Paid Google Visit Earns $2.45.

A working paper by Kaiser and Schulze, reported by Search Engine Journal on November 2, 2026, followed 102 advertiser sites with full sales tracking. In United States traffic, a paid ChatGPT visit brought in 0.89 dollars in revenue, against 2.45 dollars for a paid Google search visit. Conversion was 0.37 percent against 1.17 percent, a gap that should give any advertiser pause before shifting budget into AI chat ads.

The revenue gap, in plain terms

The core finding is simple to state and hard to ignore. A paid visit from ChatGPT was worth far less, in revenue terms, than a paid visit from Google search. The revenue figures tell the story directly: 0.89 dollars per paid ChatGPT visit in United States traffic, compared with 2.45 dollars per paid Google search visit. That is not a small difference in performance, and it is not the kind of gap that can be explained away by a single campaign or a single advertiser. Advertisers who compare channels by cost alone may therefore miss the real difference, because a cheaper click that rarely converts can still be the more expensive way to win a customer.

Conversion tells the same story from a different angle. Conversion was 0.37 percent for ChatGPT against 1.17 percent for Google, which means that visitors arriving from Google search were far more likely to complete a purchase. At the paid search rate of return, the authors value a ChatGPT ad click at about 0.26 dollars. That valuation is a way of putting a price on what a click is actually worth once revenue and conversion are taken into account, and it sets a very different benchmark from the price advertisers might expect to pay. The gap also suggests that people arriving from a chat are often still exploring an idea, rather than ready to buy, while people arriving from a search query have often already decided what they want.

Most advertisers made no sales at all

The most striking detail in the paper is how many advertisers saw nothing at all from ChatGPT ads. Among the 87 advertisers who bought both channels, 73 recorded zero sales from ChatGPT ads across 18,726 visits. That is a large number of visits with no sales to show for them, and it suggests that the problem is not limited to a few weak campaigns. For most of the advertisers in the study, paid ChatGPT traffic did not turn into revenue during the period tracked. That pattern should concern any advertiser thinking of moving a large share of budget into chat ads, because a channel that produces no sales for most buyers is difficult to justify at scale.

One advertiser accounted for 66 percent of all paid ChatGPT purchases, so the authors and the report both treat this as an early reading. That concentration matters because it means the overall revenue figure is heavily shaped by a single advertiser doing unusually well. If that advertiser were removed, the picture for everyone else would look even weaker. The paper is best read as an early signal rather than a final verdict, but the signal is clearly negative for most advertisers so far. The paper is careful not to overstate its findings, and the concentration of purchases in one advertiser is a reminder that early studies can be shaped by a single unusual success.

Organic referrals fell after ads arrived

The paper also estimates that organic ChatGPT referrals fell by about 6 to 8 percent in the first 13 weeks after ads launched, compared with the European Union where ads had not launched, while conversion on the organic visits that arrived did not change in a detectable way. That comparison is useful because it separates the launch of ads from other changes over time. The European Union, where ads had not launched, provides a baseline against which the United States experience can be judged. The comparison with the European Union is helpful here, because it shows that the fall in organic referrals coincided with the arrival of ads rather than with a wider change in behaviour.

For SEOs and marketers, the implication is that ChatGPT is not yet a reliable paid channel for most businesses, even if it is an interesting source of organic visits. Organic referrals may be falling as ads take up more space, and paid visits are converting at a much lower rate than Google search. That combination argues for caution, careful testing, and close tracking of actual sales rather than clicks. Until the revenue picture improves, ChatGPT ads look like an experiment to watch, not a budget to scale. For now, the sensible course is small, well-tracked tests focused on actual sales, with a clear view of what each click costs and what each visit is actually worth.

Sources

Sources: Search Engine Journal, November 2, 2026.