In June, ChatGPT launched paid advertising in the UK, making Britain the first country in Europe to get access after earlier rollouts in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
As with most new things, the launch brought with it big claims, from “this changes everything” to “Google Ads is dead”.
For B2B SMEs, neither is true. Yet.
What has actually happened so far
The initial UK launch was tightly controlled, with access restricted to four large global agency groups and a minimum commitment of £25,000 per advertiser. The first businesses to go live were Tesco, Hilton, Hiscox and Next.
That changed in late June when OpenAI opened up an early version of a self-serve platform, meaning any UK business or agency can now sign up, set their own budget and run a campaign.
The ads look similar to a Google search result, but rather than appearing because someone searched a specific term, they appear because the AI has decided the ad is relevant to the conversation the user is having.
How it compares to Google and Meta
Is it right for me?
When you look at the stats around the number of people who use ChatGPT, (900 million weekly active users as of April 2026), it is fair to assume the new paid ad feature is something you need to implement immediately. However, for any B2B SME, my advice is to watch and wait.
As the table above shows, there is a significant performance gap between ChatGPT and Google Ads. While the gap is likely to close, right now you will not get the same ROI as you do from Google Ads, so unless you have surplus budget (find me an SME that does!), it does not make sense to make any significant changes yet.
My other concern is that currently the ads only appear on ChatGPT’s free and lowest-paid accounts. For a consumer brand, this is less of a concern, but for a B2B business, senior decision-makers tend to be on higher-tier paid company-wide accounts, and they will not see your ads at all. This seems to have been glossed over in much of the coverage surrounding the launch, but I think it is a real limitation.
This is likely to change in time. As the platform matures, it will no doubt follow the pattern of every significant advertising channel of the last 20 years.
When every pound of your marketing budget needs to justify itself, an early-stage channel with limited data and a clear performance gap behind the established options is not where most SME budgets belong right now.
What you should focus on instead
From experience working with clients, most SMEs are not yet set up to get cited organically on AI tools such as ChatGPT, and this is where the immediate opportunity lies.
When someone types “what should I look for in a B2B IT support company” or “which agencies help manufacturing businesses with marketing”, ChatGPT generates a response. It may name specific businesses, suggest what good looks like or make direct recommendations. What determines whether your business gets mentioned has nothing to do with ad spend. It comes down to how well your website and your content give AI platforms enough useful, credible information to treat you as a trustworthy source worth referencing.
Getting this right is called GEO, Generative Engine Optimisation, and it is essentially about making sure AI tools can find, understand and cite your business when buyers are in research mode. AEO, Answer Engine Optimisation, works alongside it, structuring your content so that when someone asks a specific question, AI platforms are more likely to pull your answer to the top.
Both of these are things we help clients with, and if you want to understand where your business currently stands across AI platforms, get in touch.
