Ads have reached the AI answer
Ads are now live inside AI answers. ChatGPT Ads run in more than 60 countries. In October, Google began testing ads in AI Mode for users with Personal Intelligence turned on. In travel, the online travel agencies are buying the slot first. In a GrowByData study of 2,248 ChatGPT travel searches, Expedia alone took 22% of all sponsored placements. Ad frequency roughly quadrupled between September and early October. Viator and GetYourGuide are already running ChatGPT ads on tour questions. The ad sits under the answer, not in it. So the answer still matters most for tour and activity suppliers. What has changed is that the next click now has a price, and the marketplaces are paying it.
What actually changed in the last month?
Three things happened in quick succession:
- Reach. On 23 September, OpenAI took ChatGPT Ads to Southeast Asia and Taiwan, bringing it to more than 60 countries. Earlier launches covered Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, India and Brazil, among others.
- Formats and measurement. On 5 October, OpenAI added a visual ad format and conversion tracking. Tracking runs through partners including AppsFlyer, Adjust, Triple Whale and Northbeam. OpenAI says ChatGPT now reaches 1.2 billion people a week.
- Google. On 16 October, Google started testing personalised ads in AI Mode for users who have connected their Google apps. When Personal Intelligence launched in AI Mode, it was ad-free.
So the two largest AI answer surfaces now carry paid placements. Advertisers can track those placements through to a booking.
How often do travel answers carry an ad?
More often every week. GrowByData tracked 150 travel prompts in US ChatGPT searches between 12 September and 11 October 2026. It found 423 sponsored placements across 2,248 searches, about 19 per 100. The weekly trend matters more than the average:
| Week (2026) | Sponsored placements per 100 travel searches |
|---|---|
| 12–19 Sep | 10.5 |
| 20–26 Sep | 8.9 |
| 27–30 Sep | 3.7 |
| 1–3 Oct | 24.0 |
| 4–7 Oct | 38.3 |
| 8–11 Oct | 40.7 |
Source: GrowByData, Who's Winning the Ad Slot in ChatGPT Travel Searches?
GrowByData's retail panel jumped in the same week, from 11 to 48 ads per 100 searches. That points to a platform-wide change, not a travel one. OpenAI announced nothing. By 8–11 October, roughly two in five travel answers in the sample carried an ad.
Who is buying the slot?
Mostly intermediaries. Of the 117 advertisers GrowByData saw, Expedia took 95 placements (22.5%), more than three times the next brand. Booking sites (Expedia, Super.com, Trivago, Priceline and Kayak) took 31% of all placements. The five largest advertisers held 46%. Sixty-eight advertisers appeared only once. Tour and activity businesses were part of that long tail.
Tours are not exempt. Public ad libraries already show the experiences marketplaces at work:
- Viator ran an ad reading "Colosseum Tours & Tickets are Selling Out Fast" against a prompt about booking skip-the-line Colosseum and Vatican tickets. It also ran helicopter-tour ads for Barcelona and Oahu, and Chianti day trips from Florence.
- GetYourGuide ran "things to do" ads for Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Rio de Janeiro, Lisbon and Glasgow.
- In an audit by Mod Op, asking ChatGPT to explain how the Roman Empire fell produced a Viator ad for tours of ancient Rome. The question had no travel or purchase intent. Ads appeared in 31 of the 50 conversations tested.
Ads are matched to the conversation, not to keywords. OpenAI's help centre says the system weighs the chat's context and intent, the advertiser's landing page and copy, general location and language, and advertiser bids. A marketplace with a page for every city and every activity can match almost any travel conversation, in any market.
Does the ad change what ChatGPT recommends?
OpenAI says no. Its help centre states that ads run on systems separate from the chat model. Advertisers "cannot shape, rank, or alter responses". Ads appear below the response and are labelled.
That is the important detail. The recommendation and the ad are separate decisions. GrowByData's clearest example: on a prompt about pet-friendly hotels, Expedia was the ad on two of six runs but was never recommended in the answer. As the study puts it: Expedia doesn't need to be the answer. It needs to be the next click.
For tour and activity suppliers, this is a familiar pattern. Marketplaces have long bid on suppliers' brand names in search ads. Now they can do the same thing underneath an AI answer, sometimes when the supplier's own tour is the recommendation. A traveller reads that your small-group tour is the best option, then clicks a marketplace ad that sends them to a listing page. Your tour may still get booked. It just arrives with a commission deducted and without the customer relationship. We covered why commission sits badly with AI recommendation in Why Commission Models Break When AI Does the Recommending.
Why might suppliers not see this happening?
Because many of the people checking don't see ads. ChatGPT shows ads only on the Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts are ad-free, and so are Temporary Chats. Anyone testing ChatGPT from a paid or business account sees a clean answer. A traveller on the free plan may see the same answer with a marketplace ad under it.
Google's test is opt-in and personalised, so what one person sees in AI Mode tells you little about what a traveller in another market sees.
Should tour and activity suppliers buy ChatGPT ads?
Some will, and it can be worth testing. Self-serve buying is open in many markets. Still, the maths favours the marketplaces. They spread ad spend across thousands of products and destinations. A supplier with a handful of tours pays for every click from its own margin. And because ads are matched on relevance and bids, a deep-pocketed advertiser can show up across a whole destination.
The cheaper position is the one ads can't buy: being the recommendation itself, with a booking route that goes back to you. If you test ads anyway, keep it disciplined:
- Test in one market and on one product, and send clicks to a booking page on your own domain.
- Track cost per booking and compare it with what you pay the marketplaces in commission for the same product.
- Check answers from a free account in your key source markets, not just from a paid account.
What makes a supplier the answer rather than the ad?
AI assistants recommend what they can read, trust and book. That means:
- Live product data: prices, availability, duration, inclusions and cancellation terms in structured form on your own domain.
- Reputation signals the model can verify.
- A booking route that completes on your site, not on a listing page somewhere else.
If the model can't confirm that a tour is real, current and bookable, it falls back to the sources it can read, and those are often marketplace pages. That creates another route for the marketplace click.
Where Tixxly fits
Tixxly is AI infrastructure for tour and activity suppliers, not an OTA, and it charges zero commission. We publish suppliers' products as structured, AI-readable storefronts under their own brand and domain, with embedded checkout where the supplier is the merchant of record. We score reliability with a Trust Score and measure how often each supplier appears in AI answers. Ads in AI answers will keep growing. Our job is to make sure that when a traveller asks, the answer names your tour and the booking comes to you. Connect once. Reach everywhere.