The battle for "Answer Traffic" has begun! When ChatGPT embraces advertising mode, GEO is no longer just a concept.

Analysts from the financial giant RBC Capital Markets on Wall Street recently released a research report stating that global AI leader OpenAI is ambitious to bring advertising to all free users of ChatGPT, indicating the existence of "significantly suppressed demand for advertising placements." RBC Capital Markets stated that OpenAI has confirmed that it will bring advertising to all free users in the U.S. market in its ChatGPT AI application, which has 900 million weekly active users globally. The fact that this AI unicorn company started advertising trials just under a month ago demonstrates that there is indeed a "significantly suppressed demand for advertising placements" driven by groundbreaking AI technology. OpenAI embracing an advertising model is a significant catalyst for the emerging concept or new investment theme in the global stock market called GEO mode. This move has the potential to ignite an "answer-based economy driven by AI" and lead a new wave of brand traffic revolution. Bringing advertising to all ChatGPT free users essentially aligns with the GEO mode's emphasis on "prioritizing/referencing products in search or response results provided by AI Chatting Siasun Robot & Automation" for AI commercialization direction. The rise of the GEO mode implies that the focus of brand competition is shifting from search result pages to AI-generated answers themselves. OpenAI introducing advertising on the ChatGPT platform strengthens the trend of commercialization expansion of generative AI platforms. This trend complements the logic of the GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) mechanism in terms of brand visibility and commercial exposure, helping to spark market interest and investment enthusiasm in the GEO-related investment track. From AI chat platforms like Siasun Robot & Automation to a new frontier of advertising placements! OpenAI's advertising strategy is picking up speed, pushing AI commercialization into uncharted waters. Analyst Brad Erickson, leading the senior analyst team at RBC Capital Markets, wrote in a report sent to clients, "There is apparently suppressed demand for a new digital advertising model dominated by OpenAI technology (our ongoing channel research over the past year has consistently emphasized this point), and we still believe that all things will evolve gradually. Specifically, we believe that a complete disruption of digital advertising expenditure will only occur when the measurement of upstream funnel activities on ChatGPT exposes Alphabet Inc. Class C unfairly taking credit for clicks that belong to others; and recent negative comments from Walmart Inc. regarding the poor conversion performance on the ChatGPT platform also add to the challenge faced by OpenAI." The company announced last month that it will begin testing ads for logged-in ChatGPT adult users in the Free and Go subscription levels. In the U.S. market, the price for ChatGPT Go is $8 per month; in comparison, the subscription prices for ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Pro are $20 and $200 per month, respectively. Furthermore, analyst Erickson stated that Walmart Inc.'s decision to abandon checkout within the platform, opting to use a critical app within ChatGPT internally, combined with a new GEO advertising placement model statement from the global digital advertising leader Alphabet Inc. Class C (GOOGL.US), indicates that no company has yet demonstrated a solid and increasingly strong advertising placement experience in AI chat and Siasun Robot & Automation internally. Despite this, the team led by analyst Erickson firmly believes that OpenAI bringing advertising to all free ChatGPT users highlights the suppressed demand for advertising and may have broader impacts. Erickson and other analysts added, "The assumption of favoring the OpenAI camp would be that Alphabet Inc. Class C is leveraging superior reporting capabilities and AI technology to attribute the massive click traffic resulting from relevant research completed in the upstream funnel of ChatGPT to themselves. The Walmart Inc. case is intriguing because, although the conversion rate on ChatGPT is lower than that of Alphabet Inc. Class C and other alliance channels, it is unclear whether Walmart Inc. has the capability to dissect Alphabet Inc. Class C reports and separate out the important upstream or front-end chain research activities that should rightfully attribute credit to ChatGPT. In our view, this is a key threshold for the success of OpenAI's advertising business, as the exclusive user experience of ChatGPT and the lack of a deeper digital advertising ecosystem in the forefront of AI applications may not allow it to quickly demonstrate its value to advertisers, especially in a situation where commercial activity within the platform itself is fundamentally unviable for potential advertisers." Therefore, in the view of the RBC analyst team, many users may first conduct "upper-funnel research" in ChatGPT, such as understanding products, comparing brands, narrowing down choices; but the actual clicking on ads, searching, and completing purchases may occur on platforms like Alphabet Inc. Class C or other channels. As a result, the credit for the final conversion is likely to be easily taken by Alphabet Inc. Class C, while ChatGPT, although influencing user decisions, cannot obtain quantifiable attribution credit. If ChatGPT can only influence users in the early stages of research and struggles to string together "viewing ads - clicking - ordering" like Alphabet Inc. Class C, then advertisers will continue to allocate budgets to platforms that are easier to measure ROI. Walmart Inc.'s case illustrates this point. RBC rates Alphabet Inc. Class C's parent company Alphabet as "outperforming the market," but the 12-month target price given is $300, indicating RBC's lack of optimism about the future stock price prospects of Alphabet Inc. Class C's parent company. At the close of Monday's U.S. stock market, Alphabet's stock price was $302.06, with a year-to-date decline of about 3%. According to local media reports on Monday local time, OpenAI has hired David Dugan, a former top digital advertising executive at Meta Platforms (META.US), the parent company of Facebook, as the Vice President of Global Advertising Solutions. This latest development clearly indicates that ChatGPT is striving to upgrade from a "high-frequency AI tool" to a "traffic scene that can be formally budgeted by advertisers." Fidji Simo, the CEO of OpenAI's application business, has been looking for a candidate to oversee the monetization efforts of the company's AI commercialization aspect for months, and the new advertising placement model of the GEO mode is undeniably an important AI monetization path. With ChatGPT boldly embedding advertisements, GEO mode receives a significant catalyst. OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, is starting to embrace an advertising model, which is a significant catalyst for the new investment theme and novel concept of the GEO mode (Generative Engine Optimization). As ChatGPT and other AI applications like Gemini 3 sweep across the globe, the logic of advertising placements is gradually reshaped: progressively advanced AI models are making the traditional "click to search" approach potentially obsolete, accelerating the migration towards the GEO mode. The core of this mode is to make content more likely to be recalled and trusted by AI models: structured information, specific data, authoritative sources, and matching the RAG model retrieval and generation mechanisms. Therefore, in the future, brands will not be competing for "rankings" but for being "referenced by AI models," and this AI "answer traffic" battle has already begun. The appearance of advertising placements in generative AI platforms shifts the commercial exposure path in the AI application ecosystem from "passive searching" to "passive answering + ad displaying." In this mode, brands and marketers will emphasize how to be "more frequently quoted/recommended by generative AI on platforms like ChatGPT," which is the core aim of the GEO mode. If the commercialization scale of large AI models expands, marketing budgets and strategies will shift more towards the new advertising ecosystem based on AI results as an entry point. This may lead to GEO gaining more attention and funding from the financial market as a technology/service tool. For commercial advertising placements, it is undeniable that GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is becoming the traffic entry point and marketing survival rule of the "AI + search" era. As generative AI technology around ChatGPT has gradually become a new entry for user searches and information retrieval, brands, advertisers, and marketing agencies are heavily investing in GEO strategies to compete for "AI answer visibility" in the AI application ecosystem. This has created a new advertising/content optimization track. The introduction of advertising by OpenAI and the leveraging of AI in the GEO market logic to achieve greater commercialization scalability are totally consistent trends. One of the motives for OpenAI to launch the advertising model is the need for more stable and diversified revenue sources to support high AI computation infrastructure investments and high R&D costs (expected to be huge by 2030), especially under the enormous pressure brought by Gemini of Alphabet Inc. Class C. Having over 900 million weekly active users, OpenAI is undoubtedly a high-frequency entry point for advertising displays and commercialization. GEO is an optimization strategy specifically designed for generative AI large platforms (such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc.), with the core goal of promoting visibility and commercial opportunities by having brands, products, or services more frequently referenced or recommended in AI-generated responses. This is not traditional search engine SEO ranking optimization but an optimization method that makes large models "actively mention" certain content in generating answers. With ChatGPT boldly embedding advertisements, it essentially tells the market that the GEO mode will completely revamp budget allocations for advertisers and elevate the value of the "answer entry point."