Google booked nearly $295 billion in advertising revenue last year, and search alone pulled in $225 billion — about $4.3 billion every week. That's the prize OpenAI is circling with its new ChatGPT ad products, and it explains why the company, which would never say so publicly, effectively wants to be Google.

The comparison that frames the gap: The Trade Desk, the largest independent demand-side platform (software that lets advertisers buy ad placements programmatically), booked $2.9 billion in annual revenue. Google's search business generates more in an average week than The Trade Desk does in a year, per its own financial results.

ChatGPT has reached the same moment of expressed intent — the point where a person states what they need — that Google monetized so effectively. Whatever OpenAI ends up calling its ad business, that's the target.

Why ChatGPT shows more intent than search?

Think about how you use tech products. You open Instagram to lean back and scroll; you don't need anything. You open Google because you need a new blue sweater. That's high intent.

ChatGPT often goes further. Nobody types "sweater" into it. They say they need something warm for a January week in Chicago, that wool makes them itch, and that they'd rather not spend more than $150. Every prompt becomes a brief. Users hand over wishes, constraints, objections, and worries — then compare options and decide.

That comparison is exactly where every sweater brand wants to stand. And OpenAI has started selling the spot.

The plumbing already exists, as Patrick Briggs, CEO of digital marketing firm Semify, lays out:

• Advertisers can buy on a CPM or CPC basis (cost per thousand impressions, or per click) through OpenAI's beta self-service Ads Manager.
• They can measure conversions with a pixel and a Conversions API (tools that track whether an ad led to a purchase).
• They get campaign-level performance reporting.
• OpenAI is testing Sponsored Agents, which let a user start a separate conversation with an advertiser after clicking an ad.

What's missing from the ad platform?

Google became an unrivalled profit machine because advertisers can see the demand. They pick keywords, get reports on which searches triggered their ads, learn which searches became customers, and block the losers with negative keywords.

ChatGPT offers nothing comparable yet. An ad shows up next to a conversation, and the advertiser has no idea what kind of conversation it was.

What OpenAI needs to build, Briggs argues, is analytics that show advertisers consumer intent based on prompts: which intent categories the impressions ran against, whether people were exploring, comparing, or ready to act, and which sweater prompts turned into business — and which didn't. Google's advertisers have had some version of that map for two decades. It's why brands keep paying.

Can intent be measured without invading privacy?

Privacy is the obvious objection. People tell ChatGPT things they'd never type into a search box, and no advertiser should get to read a conversation or see an individual prompt.

Nobody is asking for that, Briggs writes, and it isn't an excuse. Google has worked around the same problem for decades — limiting, aggregating, and bucketing queries too rare to show individually. The ad industry already turns web behavior into pseudonymized, aggregated audience signals. OpenAI, which already says advertisers get aggregated performance insights with no access to individual chats, can roll up commercial patterns inside conversations into categories while keeping the conversations themselves locked.

Where will the budget come from?

This matters because of how budgets get assigned. A CMO funds a platform based on what it can prove. If ChatGPT offers reach, impressions, and clicks with no real view of intent, it gets filed under experimental or awareness — money from the innovation line or paid social.

If it connects privacy-safe intent categories to business outcomes, it competes for paid search dollars: the budget set aside for capturing existing demand. That is the money pile.

Marketers have a say, too. Briggs's advice: buy ChatGPT like a search channel, run it against paid search as well as paid social, ask reps what intent reporting exists today, and keep asking. Until OpenAI shows the intent behind a click, don't pay search prices for it.

OpenAI already has the hard part down — people volunteering goals, problems, preferences, and purchase criteria in their own words, the behavior Google spent years teaching. What's missing is the advertiser's map of that intent.

There's upside for users as well. When advertisers understand what people want, the ads improve. Someone who asked about an itch-free sweater under $150 should see one.

The bottom line, per Briggs: if OpenAI wants to be Google, it can't hide the data much longer. It has to make intent measurable — without making it personal.