AI advertising is growing fast, but the numbers don’t add up yet
AI advertising is attracting real money and real advertisers. But the measurement layer underneath it is still broken, and a Gartner warning about $3.5 trillion in potential write-downs by 2030 is worth taking seriously before you shift budget.
ChatGPT advertisers tripled in six weeks
According to The Information, the number of ChatGPT advertisers grew from 20,000 to 60,000 in just six weeks. OpenAI has been recruiting advertising talent and cutting prices to pull brands in. One agency reports paying around $5 per click on ChatGPT compared with $30 to $50 on Google for comparable business software campaigns.
Google also launched Universal Cart in the US during this period, letting shoppers add products from multiple retailers into a single basket through Google Search and Gemini. The platform-level bet on AI shopping is clearly accelerating.
The measurement problem is bigger than it looks
Here is the part that should give any operator pause. Research reported by Search Engine Journal found that Google search results and OpenAI’s API identified just 26% of the individual webpages cited by ChatGPT in a study. That means tools promising to measure your AI visibility are working with incomplete data at best.
The attribution gap compounds it further. Some ChatGPT referral links are arriving without their usual tracking tags, making it harder to connect AI-driven traffic to actual outcomes in your analytics. Google rankings are also showing unexpected fluctuations at the same time, adding another variable to an already noisy picture.
AI agents are getting blocked at the door
Agentic commerce, where AI agents find and complete purchases on a user’s behalf, is one of the bigger bets in the space. The problem is that major platforms are not playing along. The Verge reports that Amazon, Yelp, and other large platforms are restricting autonomous AI agents from accessing their content, citing security and commercial concerns.
The $3.5 trillion infrastructure question
Gartner warns that more than $3.5 trillion in AI infrastructure investment could be exposed to financial write-downs by 2030. AI providers are expected to spend nearly $1 trillion on infrastructure in 2026 alone, followed by another $6 trillion between 2027 and 2030. To generate a 12% return on that, data center owners would need $8.5 trillion in revenue. Gartner forecasts AI-related revenue attributable to those data centers will reach no more than $3.6 trillion over the same period.
Gartner also predicts that more than 80% of specialist AI cloud providers could cease operating independently by 2030 as costs mount and competition intensifies.
The operator takeaway
The early click cost data from ChatGPT is genuinely interesting. But with attribution gaps, blocked agents, and a structural overspend warning at the infrastructure level, this is not a moment to treat AI channel metrics as settled. The road to reliable visibility measurement is going to be long.
I’m founder of BizStack at Cagri Sarigoz LLC and a passionate advocate for entrepreneurs.
With over 14 years in tech, marketing, and AI, including my role as Head of SEO at CitizenShipper and co-founder of TaleBot at Intale AI, I’m dedicated to sharing genuine, useful product insights and tips.
At BizStack, I aim to cut through the digital noise to provide clear, actionable advice.
And more than all else, I’m a father to a (always) little girl and a husband.
Contact me at [email protected] for assistance.
