Koah reports 4x GMV growth as ad spend shifts into AI chat
Advertisers are starting to put real money into AI conversation placements, and one early infrastructure play is showing it. San Francisco-based Koah builds native ad formats for generative AI applications. The company reported that gross merchandise value grew fourfold in Q3 2026 compared to Q2.
What Koah Actually Does
Koah sits between AI application developers and brands. Developers integrate Koah to monetize their products. Brands get placements inside AI conversations where users are actively researching and comparing options. The ad unit is called the Card format, and Koah reports it performs at a 1.96% click rate, which the company says is roughly 40x the average for display ads.
The framing from Koah CEO Nic Baird is that the intent signal inside an AI conversation is fundamentally different from a search query. A user asking an LLM about a wedding outfit is providing context that a keyword search never could.
Early Advertiser Signals
Kristin Secora-Sampat, VP of Growth at UrbanStems, described the motivation for testing the channel at a Koah-hosted discussion:
“The primary driver was wanting to know and not wanting to be behind. When this hits mass adoption, I want us to be ready to go.”That is the classic early-mover rationale. Whether it pays off depends on whether conversational AI becomes a primary discovery channel at scale.
Network Data Worth Watching
Koah also released usage data from its network. Information-seeking prompts account for 41% of queries on Koah’s network, compared to 24% in ChatGPT reference data the company used for comparison. Writing prompts account for just 3% on Koah’s network versus 24% in the reference data. Koah interprets this as evidence that the AI applications on its network skew toward product research rather than content generation, which makes the ad placement more relevant.
On seasonality: daily queries containing the words “gift” or “gifts” more than doubled between early August and late October 2026, with recent daily volume approaching three times the early-August baseline.
The Operator Takeaway
If you run paid acquisition, this is a channel worth monitoring rather than ignoring. The 1.96% click rate claim comes from Koah’s own reporting, so treat it as a vendor stat, not an independent benchmark. But the underlying shift is real: as more consumers use AI assistants to research purchases, the attention is moving, and ad infrastructure is being built around it.
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