What happened

As well as answering questions, ChatGPT can take a single line, such as “Draw me a set of maple-red nails”, and turn it into a picture. The picture takes a little while to appear, and OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, plans to put ads in that wait.

OpenAI announced this new visual ad format on 5 October, along with a mock-up: at the top of the screen, the picture is still being generated, at 62%; below it, a card marked “Ad” has already loaded, with a brand name, product images and a “Learn more” button. OpenAI says the ads will be clearly labelled and kept separate from the image being created, and that advertising does not influence the answers ChatGPT provides.

Only people on the Free plan and the lower-cost paid plan, Go, will see these ads; OpenAI’s Help Center states that pricier plans such as Plus and Pro have no ads.

This is still only a test: it starts later in October in the US, with a first group of companies buying the ads. OpenAI hasn’t mentioned any other country, and there’s no timeline for Taiwan yet. Incidentally, a different kind of ChatGPT ad, the kind that appears below an answer, already went live in Taiwan in late September.

Why it matters to you

OpenAI only says these ads are meant to let people look at a product and picture it in their own lives; it doesn’t say why it started with image generation. Our guess is that when someone asks ChatGPT to draw something, they often already have something in mind that they want; they just haven’t decided where to buy it or who to get it from. What this ad slot sells is the moment a customer is still picturing it.

Say you run a nail salon in Zhongli, Taoyuan. A customer wants new nails for the weekend and first asks ChatGPT to draw “maple-red cat-eye nails” to see whether she likes the look. If this kind of ad ever reaches Taiwan, an ad from a nail polish brand or a salon chain might appear while she waits for the picture.

The next step is one customers in Taiwan can already take: the picture comes out, she loves it, and she asks ChatGPT, “Which nail salons in Zhongli can do this?” For a question like that, ChatGPT may look things up online before writing out the few places it recommends. That list is ChatGPT’s own answer, not an ad. In our view, whether you’re on that list has a lot to do with whether what it finds says you do this style. Swap in wedding photography, made-to-measure clothing, floristry or any business where customers choose a style from a picture first, and it works the same way.

Ads during image generation are just one of several ChatGPT has added lately. In under a month there have been three new moves: first, a brand could pay to place an “AI sales assistant” in the conversation, which you tap to ask about that brand’s products (starting with US brands); then ads below answers reached Taiwan; and now even the wait for an image is up for sale. Back in September, OpenAI said it would keep building new ad formats over the next few months. Your competitors may already be buying the kind of ad that’s live in Taiwan, and customers on the Free plan can see it; if you use a paid plan such as Plus yourself, you won’t see a single one.

What to do about it

Start now, and start by making sure AI knows which styles you can deliver; that part takes time. As for image ads like these, if they become available in Taiwan and you want customers to see you early, they’ll be one more option on the table.

When a customer takes the picture AI drew and goes back to ask AI who can make it, what they’re asking about is mostly a style: the colour, the look, the occasion.

A nail salon’s best work is mostly shown in photos. Customers take in your Instagram feed of finished sets at a glance, but you have no direct way of knowing what AI takes from those photos, or whether it can tell a cat-eye set from an ombré, so photos alone may not be enough. Salons and customers also often call the same style by different names: your price list calls it “Autumn Maple”, customers asking AI say “maple-red cat-eye nails”, and the names shift with trends. For AI to make the match, the descriptions on your website, Instagram and Google Maps all have to be rewritten style by style in the words customers use; and once they are, nothing on your side tells you whether AI now links you to those styles.

Matching the names you use to the ones your customers use is everyday work in our managed GEO service. GEO, short for generative engine optimisation, comes down to whether AI thinks of you when customers ask, and whether it can say what you do. Our team fixes your site’s content, brings what’s said about you elsewhere into line (such as Google Maps and your business listings on other platforms), and regularly checks how AI engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity describe you. You just review the results.

When a customer finishes a picture and asks “Where can I get this done?”, it’s easy to miss what’s missing from the lines ChatGPT writes about you. You see your name and relax, and because you know which styles you can do, you quietly fill in the ones it never mentioned. To see that clearly, draw one with us. That’s our demo: a session with one of our consultants where they show you live. The consultant asks ChatGPT to draw a style your customers would want, then asks where to get it done, to see whether it thinks of you; if it mentions you, the consultant points out which of your styles it named and which it left out. The demo also covers your website’s GEO audit score: geoweb.tw’s free website audit, which checks how well AI can understand your site and scores it across 12 areas.

Further reading