ChatGPT Ads Are Here. Here's What Travel Brands Should Actually Do About Them

Resist the urge to file this under PPC. Bolt a bit of budget on, check the click-through, decide it's not working, switch it off - that's the obvious path, and it's the wrong one. Not because the channel failed. Because you measured it on the one number it was never going to win.

There are two contests running here, and you win them with different tools.

The contest to be recommended. ChatGPT names the brands it trusts. You earn that with consistent business data, recent reviews and credible editorial coverage. There is no way to buy it.

The contest to hold the ad slot. That one you just pay for.

If you've only got budget and attention for one of them right now, put it into being recommended. The ad slot is worth claiming while it's cheap and empty - it's a real edge, but a temporary one. Being the brand ChatGPT recommends compounds over time, doesn't switch off when your budget does, and is far harder for a competitor to buy their way past.

Run both if you can. Just never let the ad stand in for the recommendation. It isn't a substitute.

It's a reasonable assumption: pay OpenAI, get named by ChatGPT. It doesn't work like that.

OpenAI is clear on this: the ad sits under the answer, separate from it, with no influence over it. That's not a technicality - it's the entire product. ChatGPT is only worth anything if people believe what it tells them. Sell the recommendations and you've sold the only thing that made the ads worth buying.

So expect more ads. Just don't expect them to move above the answer.

Park the ads for a second, because they're not the real story.

Booking a trip used to take about a dozen steps. Search. Skim a page of links. Open five tabs. Compare prices. Go somewhere else for reviews. Eventually book.

ChatGPT collapses all of that into one exchange. The traveller describes the trip they want. They get back three or four named hotels.

That's the part that should keep you up at night - not the question of if you should be spending your advertising budget with ChatGPT. This disruption started well before the ads arrived. Ten blue links meant ten chances to catch someone's eye. Three names means you're either on the list or you're invisible. There's no page two to fall back to.

Advertising adds a layer of competition. It isn't the fundamental change. The fundamental change is that AI now decides which handful of hotels even make it into the conversation. 

Miss the shortlist and you never get to compete for the booking at all.

Almost certainly. History makes the case for us.

The internet has always run on one business model that works at global scale. Google gives its search engine away and makes around 75% of Alphabet's revenue from advertising. Meta gives away Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger to billions of people, with advertising accounting for around 98% of its revenue. YouTube took years to become a real business after Google bought it in 2006 - Google didn't even break out its revenue separately until 2019 - and it now brings in roughly $40 billion a year, almost entirely from ads.

The reason is boring and unavoidable. Free products used by hundreds of millions of people cost a fortune to run, and subscriptions rarely cover it.

AI makes the maths worse. Some estimates suggest AI companies lose around $21.67 for every $1 they earn from heavy users. A typical consumer AI subscription is $20–$40 a month, while power users running agentic workflows or coding tasks can burn through $150–$250+ in monthly compute.

So the question was never whether ads would arrive. It was how they'd differ from search ads.

The answer, again, is trust. Google's product is a page of links. ChatGPT's product is the answer itself. The moment advertising starts shaping that answer, the reason anyone uses it disappears.

Which lands us back in the same place: the prize isn't the slot beneath the answer. It's being in the answer.

Four steps, in order. If you skip to step three and start buying, you'll be paying to send traffic to a brand ChatGPT still doesn't recommend.

1. Audit your AI visibility

Before you change a thing, find out where you actually stand.

Run the prompts your guests would run. Write down who ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity name. Track how often you show up against your comp set, so you've got a baseline to move.

We go deep on the method in our companion blog, coming soon: track your Share of Voice across AI search.

2. Win the organic recommendation

This is the bulk of the work, and where nearly all the value sits.

• Make your entity data consistent everywhere. Name, address, descriptions and positioning across your site, Google Business Profile, OTAs and directories
• Build review volume and recency. AI weights recent sentiment heavily - Tripadvisor and Feefo do real work here
• Invest in editorial coverage. It's direct fuel for AI recommendation

That's the remit of AI search (GEO/AEO) for travel, and travel digital PR.

3. Test the ad slot deliberately

If you're buying, buy with discipline.

• Write intent-specific landing pages that match how a traveller actually described their need. Don't send that traffic to a generic brand page
• Tighten your positioning. Bin the vague "luxury" and "unique" and replace them with specifics
• Start small and instrumented, on your highest-value queries only

4. Measure cost-per-outcome, not vanity clicks

Hold this channel to booking-engine starts, enquiries and revenue. Not impressions. Not CTR.

Click-through is low and it's going to stay low. This channel only justifies itself if the quality of the few clicks you get carries it.

You're only reaching part of the audience. Ads show to Free and Go users only. Anyone on a paid plan sees nothing. So if your guests are the sort of people who pay for ChatGPT, your reachable audience is a lot smaller than the headline user numbers suggest.

Hardly anyone clicks. Reported click-through sits well below Google Search, and no amount of clever copywriting will fix that. Someone mid-conversation is exploring, not shopping. Expect very few clicks and judge the channel on whether the ones you get are worth having.

The tracking is patchy. Conversion tracking only turned up partway through the pilot, so early advertisers were largely guessing at what their money did. It's improving. It isn't Google-grade yet.

A bad ad costs you more here. Your placement sits directly beneath a confident, authoritative answer. In that setting, a weak or off-brand ad does more damage to your reputation than the same ad would in a social feed.

None of this is a reason to skip the channel. It's a reason to go in with your eyes open.

The ad slot under every ChatGPT answer is a real opportunity, and in travel it's cheap and largely uncontested today. Claim it while that's true.

But the lasting advantage isn't the slot. It's being the brand ChatGPT recommends.

Earn the recommendation. Claim the slot. Measure both on bookings.

AI search is moving fast, but you don't have to work it out on your own.

We help travel and hospitality brands win where discovery is actually happening - in AI answers as much as in search results. We build your AI visibility through AI search (GEO/AEO) for travel and travel digital PR, and we help you test emerging channels like ChatGPT ads properly: deliberately, measured on outcomes, and built on an organic foundation that keeps paying you back.

Book an AI Visibility Audit and we'll show you exactly where you stand and what to do next.