OpenAI pushes search and ads

OpenAI is trying to turn ChatGPT into three businesses at once: a better search engine, a shopping guide, and a place where advertisers can measure whether a chat led to a sale. In the same week, it also added a new $100 monthly plan aimed at people who use its coding agent heavily. (help.openai.com) (cnbc.com) (adweek.com) The search piece is the easiest to see. OpenAI’s Help Center says ChatGPT search now gives “more factual” answers, handles longer conversations better, and is better at recognizing when a user is trying to shop for something instead of just ask a question. (help.openai.com 1) (help.openai.com 2) That shopping shift changes what ChatGPT is doing inside a conversation. OpenAI says shopping prompts can show product images, product details, and links to merchant sites, and it says those product results are selected independently and are “not ads.” (help.openai.com) OpenAI has also added a separate shopping research tool that asks follow-up questions about things like brand, size, price, and style before comparing products. That makes ChatGPT look less like a chatbot answering one prompt and more like a sales assistant trying to narrow down a purchase. (help.openai.com) At the same time, the company is building the paid side harder. CNBC reported on April 9 that OpenAI launched a $100-per-month ChatGPT Pro plan with five times more usage for Codex, its coding assistant, after months of complaints that the jump from $20 Plus to $200 was too steep. (cnbc.com) That pricing move is also a competitive move. CNBC said Codex revenue was running above $2.5 billion in February 2026 and that OpenAI is trying to hold developers against rivals like Anthropic, whose Claude Code has become a direct alternative for software work. (cnbc.com) Then there is the ad business, which is newer and messier. Adweek reported that OpenAI’s ad tools now include code for conversion tracking, which is the plumbing advertisers use to see whether a click or a chat later turned into a purchase, signup, or other measurable action. (adweek.com) That matters because ads without conversion tracking are like billboards without traffic counts. Adweek previously reported, and eMarketer summarized, that OpenAI’s United States ads pilot had already crossed $100 million in annualized revenue and was being extended beyond April while the company prepared pilots in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. (emarketer.com) (adweek.com) The hard part is getting people to finish a purchase inside the chat itself. A Substack report from What A Startup said OpenAI tested in-app checkout for shopping and found that users often preferred clicking out to familiar retail sites instead of trusting a chatbot with the final transaction. (whatastartup.substack.com) So the picture is not “OpenAI added shopping.” The picture is that OpenAI is stitching together search, product recommendations, merchant links, ad measurement, and premium subscriptions so that one chat window can make money from both users and marketers. (help.openai.com) (adweek.com) (cnbc.com) All of that is landing under heavier political pressure. On April 9, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said his office would investigate OpenAI over alleged harms to minors, national security concerns, and a possible connection to the 2025 Florida State University shooting, and OpenAI said it would cooperate. (techcrunch.com) (nbcnews.com) That leaves OpenAI in a familiar internet-company position. It is making ChatGPT more useful for shopping and coding, more measurable for advertisers, and more expensive for power users at the exact moment regulators are asking what happens when one product starts acting like a search engine, a store aisle, and an ad platform all at once. (help.openai.com) (cnbc.com) (adweek.com) (techcrunch.com)