Chat Ads Reach Eighty-Nine Markets

Conversational inventory is now buyable at scale, with no agreed standard for judging whether it works.

Criteo’s chief executive told AFP at Web Summit Lisbon on 10 November 2026 that most AI platforms will eventually adopt advertising, noting that OpenAI has run ads in the United States since February across free and low-cost subscription tiers, and that through Criteo it is placing conversational ads in 89 countries, with roughly 3,600 brands having tried the format and spending on the ChatGPT side rising slightly. The comparison set is instructive: Microsoft integrated ads into Copilot from 2023, Perplexity has experimented in the US since 2024, Google is weighing ads in Gemini, and Anthropic has said it will not run them. Two figures, the 89 markets and the 3,600 brands, come from Criteo and have not been independently confirmed. The gap that matters commercially is measurement: conversational ad attribution and brand-safety standards do not yet exist.