Retail and grocery brands are dominating early advertising activity on ChatGPT, according to new data from app analytics firm Sensor Tower.
As OpenAI enters the fourth week of trialling ads on its flagship chatbot, retail and grocery promotions account for 44 per cent of all ad impressions served on the platform, making them the largest category by a significant margin.
Retailers including Target, Sephora and Wayfair are among the brands already experimenting with the new advertising channel.
The findings mirror wider digital advertising trends seen on Google Search, where retail and grocery advertising has long been dominant.
Analysts suggest this reflects how users are interacting with AI chatbots, with many queries centred around product discovery, shopping research and everyday consumer needs.
Other sectors currently represent a far smaller share of ChatGPT’s ad impressions.
Media and education account for 12.6 per cent, software and technology for 11.9 per cent, travel and entertainment for 10.4 per cent, and delivery services for 9.1 per cent.
Sensor Tower said it tracked more than 100 individual brands advertising on ChatGPT during a two-week period, spanning sectors such as retail, grocery, travel, media and delivery.
Unlike traditional display advertising, the ads appear within chatbot responses and are surfaced based on the context of the user’s conversation. This means the types of ads shown are closely tied to the topics users are discussing with the AI.
The early data also offers clues about how consumers are using generative AI platforms.
According to Sensor Tower, the prominence of retail promotions suggests that behaviour traditionally associated with search engines, such as researching products, comparing options or finding places to buy items, is increasingly shifting towards AI chatbot interfaces.
This could have significant implications for marketers.
If discovery behaviour continues to migrate from traditional search environments to conversational AI, brands may need to rethink how they approach digital advertising, product visibility and customer acquisition.
However, some of the biggest retail and technology companies have yet to test the channel. Major players including Amazon, Walmart, Costco and Apple have not yet been identified among early advertisers.
With the advertising trial still in its early stages, the coming months will likely reveal whether conversational AI becomes a meaningful new performance marketing channel, or simply an extension of the existing search advertising ecosystem.
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