On 16 January 2026, OpenAI announced it was testing paid advertising inside ChatGPT. By 9 February 2026, the ads were live. Within weeks the platform expanded into the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea. The search industry spent a decade watching Google dominate. The AI advertising era just started, and it is moving considerably faster.

AIIMS Group is now an authorised reseller of ChatGPT Ads for businesses in Australia and the UAE. That means our clients have direct, supported access to the most significant new paid media channel since Google Shopping launched.

This post covers what ChatGPT Ads actually are, why GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is the new SEO, what Agentic Ecommerce Advertising means for your store, and how Natural AI Discovery works. If you sell anything online or run any form of paid media, read this carefully.

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What Are ChatGPT Ads?

ChatGPT now has nearly one billion weekly active users. That number grew 700% between June 2024 and July 2025 alone, and it is no longer primarily a work tool. People are using ChatGPT to research purchases, compare products, plan travel, find services and make buying decisions. That behaviour is exactly what advertising was built for.

OpenAI’s ad format works differently from anything that came before it. When a user on the Free or Go tier asks ChatGPT a question relevant to a product or service, a clearly labelled sponsored card appears alongside the organic answer. The card includes the advertiser’s name, a headline, a short description, an image and a destination link. OpenAI is explicit: ads do not influence the answer ChatGPT gives. The response is always generated based on what is most helpful to the user. The ad sits separately.

Targeting is contextual. OpenAI matches ads to the topic of the conversation, the user’s general location and language, and past interactions with ads. Advertisers do not receive personal data, chat transcripts or user identities. It is intent-based advertising at scale, without the privacy concerns that have plagued social platforms for years.

The numbers that matter

This is not a future opportunity. It is a live channel, and the brands that move early will build data, learnings and audience familiarity that compounds as the platform scales.

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GEO: The SEO of AI Engines

For thirty years, SEO meant optimising for Google’s crawlers. You targeted keywords, built backlinks, structured your pages correctly, and Google rewarded you with rankings. That model is not dead, but it is no longer the whole game.

When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or any AI engine a question, those platforms do not return a list of ten blue links. They generate a single, synthesised answer. Your brand either appears in that answer or it does not. There is no page two. There is no position four. You are either cited or you are invisible.

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the discipline of making sure AI engines understand, trust and surface your brand. It is built on pillars that differ meaningfully from traditional SEO:

• Entity clarity. AI engines build understanding around entities: your brand, your products, your people, your category. Structured data, consistent naming and clear topical authority help AI engines map who you are.
• Citation-worthy content. AI engines pull from sources they consider authoritative. Long-form, accurate, well-referenced content earns citations. Thin pages do not.
• Conversational alignment. People ask AI engines questions in natural language. Your content needs to answer those questions directly, not just rank for keyword variants.
• Brand consistency across the web. AI engines aggregate signals from your website, press coverage, reviews, social presence and third-party mentions. A fragmented brand story produces fragmented AI outputs.
• Technical accessibility. OpenAI’s crawler (OAI-SearchBot), Perplexity’s crawler and Gemini’s indexing systems all need clean access to your content. Blocking them in robots.txt effectively removes you from AI-generated answers.

AIIMS Group has been building GEO into our service offering since before most agencies knew what to call it. Our GEO services are purpose-built for this era of search.

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Agentic Ecommerce Advertising: The Biggest Shift in Online Retail

Paid ads inside ChatGPT are significant. But they are only one layer of what is happening in AI-driven commerce. The deeper shift is agentic ecommerce, and it changes how products are discovered, compared and purchased at a structural level.

An agentic commerce experience works like this: a user asks ChatGPT to help them find a product. The AI does not just return search results. It searches merchant feeds, compares options, filters by the user’s preferences, and surfaces specific products with a direct path to purchase, all within the conversation. The user never visits a website. The AI acts as their personal shopper.

OpenAI calls this the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP). Shopify has already activated it by default for millions of eligible merchants. Walmart launched an in-ChatGPT app experience supporting account linking and loyalty programs. Etsy was the first merchant partner for ChatGPT Instant Checkout.

For ecommerce brands, the question is no longer whether to engage with agentic advertising. It is how quickly you can get your product catalogue, data feeds and brand story into a position where AI agents surface you first.

Our team has been working with Shopify merchants on exactly this. Read our guide to Shopify Agentic Sales Channels in Australia to understand how the channel works at a product level.

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Natural AI Discovery: Being Found Without Paying for It

Not every touchpoint in the AI era is a paid placement. Natural AI Discovery is the organic side of the equation, and in many ways it is the more durable one.

When an AI engine recommends your brand unprompted, without advertising spend behind it, that recommendation carries weight that no paid ad can replicate. Users trust AI-generated answers because they perceive the AI as impartial. A natural recommendation from ChatGPT functions more like a referral than an advertisement.

Achieving consistent natural discovery requires a combination of GEO, brand authority building, structured data implementation and content strategy aligned to how AI engines reason about your category:

• Be the best answer, not just the most optimised page. AI engines read your content and judge whether it genuinely answers the question. Depth, accuracy and original perspective matter more than keyword density.
• Earn mentions from authoritative sources. Coverage in industry publications, partnerships with recognised brands and verified business profiles all strengthen your entity authority.
• Keep your information consistent and current. AI engines can surface outdated information. Your pricing, services, locations and contact details need to match across every platform they can access.
• Participate in the protocols. For ecommerce, being discoverable through OpenAI’s ACP and Google’s UCP gives AI agents the structured product data they need to recommend you accurately.
• Build memory signals. ChatGPT with memory enabled can recall a brand that impressed a user previously. Positive brand experiences compound into preferential AI recommendations over time.

Natural AI Discovery is not a one-off tactic. It runs as an ongoing programme in parallel with paid activity. Brands that invest in both will dominate their categories in AI-generated answers. Brands that invest in only one will be outmanoeuvred by those who understand the full picture.

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Why This Matters for Australian and UAE Brands Right Now

OpenAI’s initial rollout was limited to US advertisers. The platform is expanding rapidly, and Australia and the UAE are active markets with high ChatGPT adoption and sophisticated digital advertising ecosystems. The brands that build AI advertising capability now, before the channel becomes saturated in this region, will hold a structural advantage over those that wait.

As an authorised reseller, AIIMS Group gives clients in both markets:

• Direct, supported access to ChatGPT Ads through OpenAI’s advertising infrastructure
• Campaign strategy built specifically for conversational contexts, not repurposed from Google or Meta frameworks
• GEO strategy running in parallel to maximise both paid and organic AI visibility
• Agentic commerce setup for ecommerce clients, including Shopify ACP configuration and product feed optimisation
• Measurement and attribution frameworks designed for AI-native channels where last-click models do not apply

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The Channel Is Open. The Question Is Who Moves First.

Every major advertising channel in history rewarded early movers. The brands that built Google Ads accounts in 2003 paid a fraction of what those keywords cost today. The brands that ran Facebook Ads in 2012 built audiences for almost nothing. The brands that move on ChatGPT Ads now are in that same position.

The difference this time is that the channel is not just for brand awareness or top-of-funnel traffic. Through agentic commerce, it reaches all the way to purchase. A user can discover your product, compare it to competitors, and buy it without ever leaving the conversation. That is a compressed sales funnel unlike anything that has existed before.

If you operate in Australia or the UAE and want to understand what ChatGPT Ads, GEO and Agentic Ecommerce Advertising mean for your business specifically, talk to our team. We are already running this for clients and the results are early but compelling.