ChatGPT Ads in Europe: what it means for the way customers find you

What OpenAI announced

The OpenAI Blog keeps it short: ChatGPT Ads is expanding to 31 European markets. Advertisers can reach people as they explore, compare options and make a decision.

Read that again. That is exactly the moment someone is torn between you and the competitor two towns over. Until now, that moment belonged to Google.

OpenAI gives little else away. No rates, no list of countries, no date for when it switches on here. So nobody knows yet what advertising inside ChatGPT will cost. Anyone quoting you a price today is guessing.

Ten blue links become one answer

Search worked the same way for years. You typed something in, you got a list of links, you clicked the top one. The entire SEO world was built on that.

ChatGPT works differently. You ask a question and you get one answer. Soon with an ad beside it.

That leaves fewer places to win. If you are in that answer, you exist. If you are not, you do not exist for that customer right then. I already see it happening around me: someone asks ChatGPT for a good installer nearby, hears three names, calls one of them. More and more people reach for ChatGPT instead of Google, especially for questions that need explaining.

Why I wouldn't spend a euro on it today

Ads in ChatGPT will probably be worth it at some point. Right now, nobody knows what they return. No benchmarks, no experience, no colleague who can tell you what worked for them. You would be the one finding out, and you would pay for that yourself.

Big brands can carry that. They have a test budget and someone watching the numbers all day. If your company is a handful of people, that money does more elsewhere.

There is something else. An ad stops the moment you switch it off. The work that gets you mentioned in the answer itself stays put. It costs you time, not budget.

How do you get into ChatGPT's answers?

That is the question I get most often now. The answer is less exciting than people hope. It is the same work that always worked, done more precisely.

• Put your facts on your own site. Service area, opening hours, what you do and don't do, how you work. A language model builds its answer from text that exists somewhere. If it exists nowhere, the model guesses.
• Write the way customers talk. People type whole questions into ChatGPT. Put those questions on your site and answer them honestly.
• Get others to write about you. Trade sites, local media, reviews, customer stories. Models lean on what can be found about you beyond your own site.
• Check what is being said about you now. Ask ChatGPT about your own company and about your trade. Is it right? Are you named? Who is?

What you can do with this tomorrow

Start small. Open ChatGPT and ask the question your best customer would have asked before they called you. Something like: who can replace an old boiler near me? Or: what does a bookkeeper cost for a one-person business?

Write down what comes back. Are you named, is the information right, who shows up while you don't. That list is your work for this week. Usually two or three things are missing from your site that you can fix in half an hour.

And beyond that: stay calm. A channel is changing, not your trade. A customer still picks you because you pick up the phone and do what you promised. I'll keep an eye on what OpenAI publishes, and once there are real prices and real results, I'll look again at whether it's worth your money.