By O'Ryan Johnson
Publication Date: 2026-02-11 07:41:00
As OpenAI walks the advertising tightrope to balance revenue gains against credibility and safety, ad kingpin Google is roaring ahead to use AI to improve its advertising products.
Forrester vice president and principal analyst Dipanjan Chatterjee told The Register “the jury is out” on whether consumers will bite on ads in chatbots, like the ones OpenAI introduced in its lowest ChatGPT tiers on Monday.
“Answer engines have earned high trust among consumers partly because of the conversational fluidity of the experiences and partly because of their prescriptive and often authoritative personality,” he said, using a neologism for AI chatbots. “Throwing advertising into the mix muddies the waters and detracts from the credibility of the experience. There is likely to be a backlash in the short term, and Anthropic is already using the Super Bowl to stir those murky waters,” he noted, referring to the anti-advertising ads OpenAI’s main competitor aired on TV during the game on…