Say you run a leak-repair and waterproofing business in Xizhi, in New Taipei. At the end of September you hear that ChatGPT has started showing ads in Taiwan, and that Taiwanese companies can open an account online and buy them themselves. You immediately think of the customer who told you on the phone last month that before he rang, he’d asked ChatGPT, “Who’s a reliable leak-repair company in Xizhi for a leaking rooftop?” People keep telling you to look into GEO, too, which just means making sure that when AI tools like ChatGPT answer customers, you’re in the answer and it gets you right. Now that you can buy ads, can you skip that?

You still need it. What an ad buys is the slot below the answer marked “Ad”. Which businesses the answer above names, and what it says about you, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, says ads can’t influence. So it isn’t a choice between the two, only a question of order: find out how the answer describes you first, then decide how to spend on ads.

Ads go in the slot below the answer

On 23 September OpenAI announced that ChatGPT ads were starting to roll out in Taiwan and several Southeast Asian countries. According to OpenAI’s Help Center, ads may appear below a response, clearly labelled and kept separate from the answer. Not everyone sees them, either. Only people on the Free plan or on Go, the cheaper paid plan, do; the pricier plans like Plus and Pro, and the versions for businesses and schools, have no ads.

Which ad appears depends on what the conversation is about. The customer in Xizhi asked about a leaking roof, so an ad for leak repair or waterproofing could show up under the answer. When more than one ad fits, OpenAI says it weighs how relevant each ad is to the conversation together with how much the advertiser bids, then decides which goes first. In other words, it’s a bidding contest for the slot: you can bid, and so can the competitor down the road.

For Taiwanese businesses, the most direct way in is Ads Manager, OpenAI’s self-serve ad platform; as long as the company placing and paying for the ads is based in Taiwan, it can open an account itself. OpenAI’s help page also makes clear that ads are paid placements, and that seeing a business’s ad doesn’t mean OpenAI recommends it.

Money can’t buy the answer above

OpenAI puts it bluntly in its Help Center: ads run on separate systems from the one that writes the answers, and advertisers can’t shape, rank or alter ChatGPT’s responses. Google’s search results also include an answer written by AI, and Google places ads labelled “Sponsored” inside it too, though ads inside the AI answer aren’t available in Taiwan yet; its help page for advertisers likewise states that buying ads doesn’t influence what the AI answer says.

That’s the platforms’ own account, and nobody outside can open up their systems to check. But both have spelled it out: money buys the slot marked as an ad, not what the answer itself says.

So what is the answer based on? OpenAI says that when a question needs current information, ChatGPT may search the web first and write its answer from what it finds. When a customer asks which leak-repair company is reliable, what it has to work with is mostly whatever anyone can read online: your website, your business listing on Google Maps, articles other people have written about you. Whether you’re in the answer, and whether it gets you right, depends more than anything on whether that information is complete and accurate, and that’s the part GEO looks after.

Ads are rented; your place in the answer follows the information

An ad is like rented space. It appears because you pay, whether it shows and under which kinds of conversations depends on your bid and budget, and when the budget stops, the slot goes to someone else. Renting has its advantages: you decide when to start and when to stop, which makes it good for timing. If your phone rings most each year around the plum-rain season and typhoon season, and you want to take on more jobs in those months, that’s when ads earn their keep. Advertisers also get figures like views and clicks, so you have a rough idea of how many people your money reached.

Your place in the answer isn’t paid for per view, so it doesn’t vanish the day your budget stops; it follows the information AI reads. If your website spells out which kinds of work you do and which areas you cover, and what’s said about you elsewhere matches it, then next time AI writes an answer it has something to say about you. And customers on Plus or Pro have no ads on their screen at all; the answer is all they see.

The drawbacks are that it’s slow and it changes. Once the information is fixed, the answer only changes after AI has read it; and if a competitor spells things out more clearly than you, or your old phone number is still out there, the answer may switch to someone else or get you wrong.

Check how the answer describes you, then decide where the money goes

How much should go to ads and how much to GEO depends on your trade, your area and how the answer describes you now, so there’s no one-size-fits-all ratio. The order, though, is easy to work out from where the answer stands today.

If you’re already in the answer and it gets you right, ads are a boost. With typhoon season coming, put an ad of your own under the answer as well, and customers asking about leaks get one more chance to see you.

If you’ve just opened, just opened a new branch or just added a service, say going from rooftops to exterior walls, there’s probably little written online about it yet, and the answer can’t mention it for a while. Using ads to get in front of customers first makes sense here, while you fill in your website and what’s said about you elsewhere so the answer can catch up.

If you’ve been in business for years and you’re still not in the answer, it’s usually not a matter of time: the information about you online is too thin, too old or doesn’t add up. An ad will still put you in the slot below, but the answer above is still recommending someone else, and it stands to reason that customers read the answer before they scroll down to the ad. An ad can’t fill your place in the answer. Here, start with the information; run ads too if you like, but treat them as one more chance to be seen.

What needs dealing with first is an answer that gets you wrong. ChatGPT says you only do exterior walls when rooftops are your speciality, or it’s still giving out your phone number from two years ago. An ad can’t change the words above it; buy one now and customers read a description that gets you wrong before they reach your ad, so you’re paying to put the wrong version in front of more people. Find what’s wrong, fix it in the information AI reads, and then you can spend on ads with peace of mind.

Ads can target conversations; the answer has to be looked after as a whole

All of this assumes you know how the answer describes you right now, and that’s exactly what’s hardest to see for yourself, because the moment a customer phrases the question differently, the answer can change. Ask “Who should I call about a leaking roof?” and you may be in it; ask “My bathroom ceiling keeps dripping” or “What do I do about damp coming through the outside walls of an old flat?” and you may not be, or it may say you only do one of those things.

Ads are simpler here: in your campaign settings you can give the system context hints about which kinds of conversations you want to appear alongside. Answers can’t be handled one question at a time like that. When AI answers those questions it mostly reads the same pool of information, the same website, the same Google Maps listing, the same few articles about you, so changing one thing can move several answers at once. Say you want more bathroom-leak jobs, so you rewrite your homepage introduction around bathroom waterproofing. Customers asking about bathrooms find you more easily, but the rooftop question it used to get right may get knocked out along the way. So every change means asking all the different versions of the question again together, then asking again a while later and comparing; opening ChatGPT for a couple of questions whenever it crosses your mind won’t show you those shifts.

The ad slot you can buy yourself once you’ve opened an Ads Manager account. The answer is something to look after over the long run, and you can hand it to our managed GEO service: we fix your website content, bring what’s said about you elsewhere into line, then regularly put the same set of questions to ChatGPT, Gemini and other leading AI engines and compare against last time. You just look at the results.

Whether or not you end up buying ads, you can book a demo with one of our consultants to see how the answer describes you now. The consultant takes the situations customers in your line most often come to you with, such as a leaking roof, a dripping bathroom ceiling or damp exterior walls for a leak-repair business, turns them into the sentences customers would actually type, puts them to ChatGPT there and then, and goes through them with you one by one: which include you, which don’t, and which get you wrong. The same session also covers your website’s GEO audit score. The audit is free, and it looks at whether AI can understand your website. By the end you’ll have a clear idea of whether to buy ads, and under which kinds of questions.

Further reading