For more than two decades, Google has been one of the main gateways to the internet. Whenever we wanted to find a product, research a topic, choose a restaurant or compare different services, we would open Google, type in a few words and start working our way through the results. That simple habit helped create one of the largest advertising businesses in history, because the moment someone searches for something they often reveal exactly what they are interested in buying.
Artificial intelligence is beginning to change that habit. Instead of searching through a list of websites, people are increasingly asking AI platforms to understand what they need and help them find an answer. A person looking for a new laptop, for example, can explain their budget, the type of work they do, how often they travel and what features matter to them, and an AI assistant can turn all of that information into a much more personalized recommendation.
That shift is also creating a new opportunity for advertisers. OpenAI has already introduced advertising on ChatGPT, and the company says its advertising business reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate in less than 200 days, with tens of thousands of advertisers using the platform. OpenAI has also been expanding ChatGPT Ads internationally, making it clear that advertising is becoming an important part of the company’s business model.
This raises an interesting question about where the internet is heading next. If people increasingly turn to AI instead of traditional search engines when they want information, recommendations, and products, could ChatGPT eventually become something like the new Google?
The difference between traditional search and AI is more significant than it might initially appear. When someone searches Google for “best laptops under €1,000,” they are presented with a collection of results and are expected to decide for themselves which websites, reviews, or products are worth their attention. Advertisements can appear alongside those results, but there is still a clear distinction between searching and making a decision.
An AI assistant changes that relationship because it can become part of the decision-making process itself. Instead of simply asking for a list of laptops, someone might explain that they need a lightweight computer for university, regularly travel by train, occasionally edit photographs, and do not want to spend more than €1,000. The AI can then compare the relevant options and explain why one might be more suitable than another.
For advertisers, that is potentially much more valuable than simply knowing which keywords someone typed into a search engine. An AI conversation can provide much more context about what a person actually wants, what their priorities are, and where they are in the buying process. OpenAI’s advertising platform is built around this idea, allowing advertisers to reach users while they are exploring products, comparing alternatives and making decisions.
That is also what makes AI advertising different from many of the advertising formats people are already familiar with. A traditional banner ad might catch your attention for a few seconds, while an AI platform has the potential to introduce a product at exactly the moment when you are trying to decide what to buy.
There is, however, a major difference between seeing an advertisement and receiving a recommendation from something you have come to trust.
Imagine asking an AI assistant which smartphone would be best for you. You explain your budget, tell it that photography is important to you, and mention that you tend to keep your phones for several years. The assistant considers your requirements and recommends a few models. If one of those recommendations happens to be sponsored, the situation becomes more complicated.
People are generally accustomed to the idea that advertisements appear in search results. They know that companies pay for visibility, and clearly labelled sponsored results are a familiar part of using the internet. An AI recommendation can feel different because it is presented within a conversation and appears to be based on an understanding of your individual needs.
This is likely to become one of the biggest challenges for AI companies as advertising becomes more important. OpenAI says advertisements on ChatGPT are clearly labelled and separated from the model’s responses, and that advertisers do not influence the answers ChatGPT provides. The company also says advertisers do not receive access to users’ private conversations.
Those distinctions will matter because trust is one of the main reasons people are willing to use AI in the first place. If users begin to suspect that recommendations are being influenced by whoever is paying for them, the relationship between people and AI could change very quickly.
From the perspective of advertisers, it is easy to see why this new environment is attractive. Traditional advertising has always been about finding people who might be interested in a particular product, but understanding genuine intent has never been particularly easy.
Someone searching for “running shoes” could be casually browsing, researching a future purchase, or simply looking for information. Someone who tells an AI assistant that they are training for their first marathon, need shoes for long-distance runs, and have a budget of €150 has provided considerably more useful information.
AI platforms are therefore in an interesting position. They can understand conversations rather than simply matching keywords, which potentially gives advertisers a much clearer picture of what consumers are trying to accomplish. For brands, that could make AI advertising one of the most valuable new channels to emerge in years.
There is also a larger commercial opportunity. If AI becomes the place where people research products, compare prices, and decide what to buy, the platform helping them make those decisions could become an important part of the entire shopping process. Instead of sending users away to dozens of different websites, AI could increasingly help them move from a question to a shortlist and eventually to a purchase.
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that this is simply a story about ChatGPT taking Google’s place. Google is moving aggressively in the other direction, bringing more AI into Search and its advertising products through Gemini.
Google has introduced AI-powered advertising and shopping experiences designed to make search more conversational and help users explore products and services in greater detail.
That means the competition is becoming less about whether people will use AI and more about which companies will control the AI experiences people use every day. Google already has an enormous advertising business and decades of experience connecting users with businesses, while companies such as OpenAI are building a new kind of interface around conversation.
The result could be a much more competitive battle for the role that search engines have traditionally played. Rather than simply competing to provide the best list of links, these platforms are increasingly competing to become the place where people ask questions, research options and make decisions.
One of the biggest consequences could be felt by websites and businesses that have spent years trying to succeed in search.
For a long time, the basic goal of SEO was relatively straightforward: identify what people are searching for, create content around those topics and try to appear near the top of Google’s results. A successful search strategy could bring millions of visitors to a website over time.
AI changes that journey because users may no longer need to visit several websites to get the information they want. If an AI assistant can read, compare and summarize information for them, the number of clicks going from an AI conversation to individual websites could look very different from the traditional search model.
That does not mean websites are going away, but it could change what it means to be visible online. Businesses may increasingly have to think about how their products, expertise, and content are represented within AI-generated answers, rather than focusing exclusively on where they rank in a traditional search engine.
In other words, the question may gradually move from “How do I rank on Google?” to “How do I make sure AI systems understand and recommend my brand?”
There is another issue that will become increasingly difficult to ignore: privacy. The more useful AI becomes, the more information people are likely to share with it. Conversations can reveal what someone is researching, what they are planning, what they are interested in buying, and sometimes much more personal details about their circumstances.
That information could make advertising significantly more relevant, but it also creates obvious concerns about how much personalization people are comfortable with. There is a meaningful difference between an advertisement being relevant because someone searched for a product and an advertisement being selected because an AI assistant understands a much broader conversation about that person’s life and preferences.
AI companies will therefore need to be particularly clear about how advertising works. Users will want to understand what information is being used, whether conversations are connected to advertising, what advertisers can see, and what controls they have over personalization.
The technology may be impressive, but none of that matters if people feel that they have lost control over their own information.
It is probably too early to say that ChatGPT is replacing Google, and the reality may be more complicated than one company simply taking another company’s place. What we are seeing is a change in how people interact with the internet.
Google’s greatest innovation was making it incredibly easy to find information. AI promises to make it easier to understand that information and act on it. That difference could have enormous consequences for advertising.
If AI becomes the place where people research products, compare options, and ask for recommendations, advertising will naturally move there as well. The challenge will be making sure that commercial interests do not undermine the trust that made these AI systems useful in the first place.
The most important question may therefore not be whether ChatGPT becomes the new Google. It may be whether AI becomes the new place where we make decisions online.
If that happens, the advertising industry will have to adapt to something it has never really had before: a platform that does not simply show consumers information, but actually talks to them about what they should do next.
And that could make AI advertising far more influential than the search ads we have become used to seeing.