Reference page. Last reviewed 25 August 2026.
LLM advertising means paid placement inside large language model environments, where a user expresses intent through a conversation rather than a search query. This page covers every platform currently offering inventory, what each one is actually doing, and how to decide where a budget belongs.
Why this channel is different
Traditional digital advertising assumes a page, a feed, a keyword, a cookie, and a click. An AI assistant has none of them. There is one conversation, delivered one turn at a time. The assistant can answer a question, name a brand, and shape a purchase decision without the user ever leaving the chat.
That has two practical consequences. Targeting becomes contextual rather than behavioural, matching the subject of a conversation instead of a query string. And measurement becomes harder, because influence often happens without an attributable click. Advertisers moving into this channel need to accept lift based measurement in place of last click attribution.
Platform by platform
ChatGPT
The only assistant with meaningful open inventory today. Sponsored placements launched 9 February 2026 on the Free and Go tiers, self serve buying opened at ads.openai.com in spring 2026, and programmatic access arrived through StackAdapt on 5 May 2026. Criteo became the first named technology partner on 2 March 2026, connecting roughly 17,000 of its advertiser clients. Full detail on our ChatGPT ads reference page.
Google Gemini and AI Overviews
Ads have appeared in AI Overviews since 2024, which means Google has been placing advertising inside AI generated answers longer than anyone. Gemini itself is a different question. Adweek reported that Google told advertisers it would bring ads to Gemini in 2026, and Google publicly denied the report. Treat Gemini inventory as unconfirmed.
Perplexity
An early mover that introduced sponsored follow up questions at the end of 2024, using a straightforward CPM model. The programme is currently paused. Perplexity’s audience skews heavily toward technology, finance, law and healthcare professionals, so for brands targeting that demographic the Publisher Programme and organic visibility are the routes still open.
Microsoft Copilot and Meta AI
Both sit inside companies with mature advertising businesses and enormous incentive to monetise assistant traffic. Neither has opened general inventory in the way OpenAI has. Expect movement, plan for it, do not budget for it yet.
Anthropic’s Claude
Explicitly positioned as ad free, a position Anthropic reinforced with a Super Bowl advertisement shortly after OpenAI’s launch. No inventory exists and none is expected.
How to decide where budget goes
Start with eligibility rather than opportunity. Health, mental health, politics, gambling, legal services and financial services are blocked from ChatGPT placement, and those restrictions cover a large share of high value advertisers. If you are in one of them, the paid question is settled and the real work is organic visibility inside AI answers.
If you are eligible, the case for testing now rests on three things. Competition is thin because most advertisers are waiting for benchmarks that do not exist. Intent quality is high, since a user four turns into describing a problem is better qualified than someone typing three words into a search box. And the cost of entry has collapsed, with the minimum spend falling from $250,000 at launch to nothing for direct self serve buyers.
What we do
We plan, buy and manage placement across these platforms, and we publish what we learn as it changes. See services, the blog, or request an assessment.