ChatGPT is emerging as a new battleground for brand visibility, as consumers increasingly use AI assistants to research products and make purchase decisions rather than relying solely on traditional search engines like Google.
MiQ, a programmatic advertising company, has already integrated OpenAI's advertising capabilities into its Sigma platform, allowing advertisers to connect ChatGPT with their broader media planning, activation, and measurement workflows using AI Search intelligence to inform planning, activation and measurement.
“OpenAI is at the forefront. They enabled ads in ChatGPT, and that is something that we have integrated already through Sigma,” Krishnakumar Govindarajan, Global CTO of MiQ, tells AIM. “Regarding the unified workflow where you can seamlessly flow from intelligence to insights to activation, we've done that for OpenAI already.”
The move comes as AI increasingly changes how consumers discover brands. Erlin AI, which tracks brand visibility across AI search, says its customers are seeing 2–3x higher conversions from LLMs than traffic from other channels.
“User engagement and retention on LLMs are growing at an incredible rate,” says Sid Tiwatne, Founder of Erlin AI, projecting that LLM search could surpass Google by around mid-2028. The company compared the shift to Google's rise in the early 2000s, but says the transition to AI search is happening much faster.
From SEO to AI Visibility
The shift could fundamentally change how brands think about search visibility.
Traditional SEO ranks the top results on a search engine results page. In an AI-generated answer, however, consumers may receive a small set of recommendations without ever seeing a conventional list of links.
“Traditional SEO was about ranking in the top five positions, which is limited real estate on top of SERP (search engine results page),” Tiwatne tells AIM in response to queries. “AI discovery matches precise consumer needs and intent to brands.”
This also changes what marketers need to measure. Instead of asking only how highly a brand ranks on Google, marketers may increasingly need to know whether an AI model mentions their brand, what sources it uses, and how frequently competitors appear instead.
“Does the AI know who you are, and is it recommending you?” Tiwatne ponders. He explains that tools can track how often a brand appears in AI answers and identify gaps, ranging from website accessibility for AI crawlers to structured data and citations from trusted sources.
The development is particularly significant for smaller brands. Erlin AI argues that AI search could give smaller businesses a better chance at being discovered because AI-generated results are not necessarily dominated by the companies with the largest advertising budgets.
Ads are Here to Stay
Recently, OpenAI announced that it will start showing ads on its ChatGPT Free and Go subscription tiers in India, starting with 50 brands. This gives the AI giant a new revenue stream before its IPO, and offers other AI players a window of opportunity.
Around 60% of AI searches end without a click, according to Tiwatne, but he does not dismiss the relevance of advertising on AI chatbots.
“The ads will continue, just in different forms,” Tiwatne adds, pointing to experiments with publisher partnerships and sponsored responses across LLM platforms such as ChatGPT and Gemini.
For advertisers, this creates a new challenge: an AI assistant may influence a purchase before a consumer ever reaches a brand's website.
MiQ has designed Sigma to give marketers visibility across this fragmented journey. The platform currently integrates nearly 600 data feeds, handles more than 2.5 petabytes of data, and connects across 16 open and closed web platforms, according to Govindarajan.
The company has also launched a browsing intelligence product that tracks how brands appear on ChatGPT. For example, a carmaker could examine how frequently its brand appears when consumers ask an AI model to recommend a mid-size SUV.
Automating Media Planning
MiQ is developing AI agents for planning and campaign trading. Its planning agent uses watching, browsing, and buying intelligence, along with historical campaign data, to turn a brand brief into a media plan.
“Right now, working through existing systems with analysts to build that picture takes a few weeks of effort. Can we have an agentic way of doing that? Our answer to that is the planning agent,” Govindarajan notes. The goal is to generate the plan within minutes.
The trading agent, meanwhile, is designed to help manage live campaigns. Traders can use prompts to understand how many campaigns are running, identify those facing problems, and determine how to improve performance, with changes pushed to the underlying demand-side platforms.
MiQ combines traditional data science, probabilistic modelling, machine learning, and LLMs to match disparate datasets and optimise campaigns.
The company plans to upgrade its AI agents and LLM capabilities to provide more automated insights. It stresses that its analytics do not influence AI-generated recommendations.
OpenAI also earlier affirmed the same when bringing ads on ChatGPT to India last month. The company had said that advertisements would not influence ChatGPT’s responses. Advertisers would also not have access to users’ chats, chat history, memories, or personal details. OpenAI also noted that it does not sell user data to advertisers.
The shift is happening against a rapidly expanding Indian digital advertising market. According to Crisil Intelligence, digital advertising accounted for about 44% of India's advertising market in FY25, with mobile making up the majority of digital ad spending.
For marketers, the implication is straightforward: consumers may increasingly ask an AI what to buy rather than searching for a brand themselves.
(Disclaimer: The copy was updated for clarity.)
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