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app.athenahq.ai/ads

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Purpose

The ChatGPT Ads page allows you to see the sponsored ads that ChatGPT serves against your tracked prompts. It reveals which advertisers (including your tracked competitors) are buying ad placements on your highest-priority topics, what their creatives look like, and how frequently those ads appear over time. Because generative AI engines are beginning to monetize answers with sponsored links, this page serves as an early-warning system for paid competitive threats. It helps you understand if competitors are buying their way to the top of answers where your brand organically ranks, or if you are losing visibility to paid placements. Note: Ad tracking began in July 2026, and only ChatGPT serves ads today.

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What’s on the page

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Page Header & Filters

  • Page Title: Reads “ChatGPT Ads” with an info icon. The tooltip explains: “Shows the sponsored ads ChatGPT serves alongside answers to your tracked prompts, and which advertisers are buying them.”
  • Filter Row: Contains controls to adjust the Date Range, apply Topics & Prompts or Prompt Tags filters, and manage Views (to save your filter combinations).

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ChatGPT Ad Pressure (Hero Card)

  • ChatGPT ad pressure: A headline percentage metric showing the share of tracked answers that contained at least one sponsored ad.
  • Metric description: Reads “Sponsored ads ran against [X] of [Y] answers to your tracked prompts.”
  • Daily trend sparkline: A visual area chart spanning the bottom of the card. Hovering over the trendline shows a tooltip with the exact date, “Ads captured”, and “Answers with ads” for that day.
  • Top advertisers on your prompts: A mini-leaderboard showing the top 4 advertisers in the selected period, complete with their favicon, brand name, relative bar indicator, and a “You” or “Competitor” badge if applicable.
  • View answers with ads: A drilldown button that navigates directly to the Responses page, pre-filtered to show only the answers that served ads.

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Stat Rail

Four compact tiles summarizing ad volume:
  • Ads captured: Displays the total number of ads tracked. The tooltip explains: “Every sponsored ad ChatGPT returned for your tracked prompts, whether or not it was displayed in the answer. The Ads shown tile counts only displayed ads.” Clicking this tile drills down to the Responses page.
  • Advertisers: The number of distinct advertisers buying ads in this period.
  • Competitors advertising: The number of your specifically tracked competitors found buying ads.
  • Ads shown: The number of ads that were actually rendered for the user. Displays a subtext (e.g., “[X] auctioned but not shown”). The tooltip explains: “Each captured ad reports whether ChatGPT displayed it. Shown means the ad rendered in the answer. Auctioned but not shown means the advertiser won an ad slot for the prompt but ChatGPT did not display the ad, which still reveals who is bidding.” Clicking this tile drills down to the Responses page.

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Advertisers

This table ranks advertisers by the number of ads captured in the selected period.
  • Info tooltip: “Advertisers ranked by ads captured in the selected period. Tracked includes your brand and tracked competitors. Expand a row to see which prompts trigger their ads and the latest creative.”
  • Segmented Toggle: Lets you switch between viewing All advertisers or only Tracked ones (your brand plus tracked competitors).
  • Search: A search bar to filter the table by advertiser name.
  • Columns:
    • #: Rank position based on ad count.
    • Advertiser: The brand’s favicon and name. Can include a “You” or “Competitor” badge.
    • Ads: The number of ads captured for this advertiser, alongside a relative colored bar indicating volume.
    • Shown: The number of ads from this advertiser that were actually displayed in ChatGPT.
    • Prompts: The number of unique tracked prompts that triggered this advertiser’s ads.
    • Last seen: The most recent date an ad from this advertiser was captured.
    • Expand toggle: A chevron on the far right that opens an inline detail view.
  • Expanded Row Detail: When expanded, the row reveals two sections:
    • Prompts triggering these ads: A list of specific prompts that surfaced this advertiser, with the exact number of ads per prompt. Clicking a prompt drills down to the Responses page specifically for that prompt.
    • Latest creative: The title and body text of the advertiser’s most recent ad. If a destination URL is available, clicking this box opens the advertiser’s landing page in a new tab.

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Top creatives

This table lists the most frequently captured ad copies.
  • Info tooltip: “Creatives are grouped by advertiser and ad copy, so tracking URL variations count toward the same creative. Captures and shown counts measure exposure in tracked ChatGPT answers, not clicks, conversions, spend, or performance.”
  • Search: A search bar to filter creatives by text.
  • Columns:
    • #: Rank position by capture count.
    • Creative: The ad’s headline and body text. If a URL is known, hovering shows a link icon, and clicking opens the landing page in a new tab.
    • Advertiser: The brand favicon and name of the advertiser running this creative.
    • Captures: The number of times this specific creative was returned across your tracked prompts.
    • Shown: The number of times this creative was actually rendered in ChatGPT.
    • Prompts: The number of distinct tracked prompts that surfaced this creative.
    • Last seen: The most recent date this creative was captured.

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What you can do here

  • Filter your view: Use the filter row to change the date range or filter down to specific Topics & Prompts or Prompt Tags.
  • Save filter views: Click Views to save your current filter configuration for easy access later.
  • Drill down to specific responses: Click View answers with ads in the hero, or click the Ads captured / Ads shown stat tiles to jump to the Responses page pre-filtered to ad-bearing answers.
  • Inspect advertiser strategies: Expand a row in the Advertisers table to see exactly which of your tracked prompts trigger their ads and read their latest ad copy.
  • Analyze specific prompts: From an expanded advertiser row, click any prompt in the “Prompts triggering these ads” list to jump directly to the Responses page to read the full ChatGPT answer alongside the ad.
  • View landing pages: Click on a linked creative in the Top Creatives table, or in an expanded advertiser row, to open the advertiser’s actual destination URL in a new browser tab.
  • Toggle Segments: Use the All / Tracked toggle on the Advertisers table to filter out unknown noise and focus solely on your defined competitors.
  • Search tables: Use the local search inputs above the Advertisers and Top Creatives tables to find specific brands or ad copy text.

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Data shown

The data on this page reflects sponsored ads that ChatGPT returned alongside answers to the specific prompts you are tracking. The “You” and “Competitor” labels are matched against the brands and competitors you configured during onboarding or in your workspace settings.

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Common workflows

Investigating competitor ad strategy:
  1. Go to the Advertisers table and toggle the segment to Tracked.
  2. Look for rows with the orange Competitor badge.
  3. Click the chevron on the right side of a competitor’s row to expand it.
  4. Review the Latest creative to see their messaging.
  5. Look at the Prompts triggering these ads list, and click on a high-volume prompt to jump to the Responses page and see how their ad looks in context against the AI’s organic answer.
Finding top-performing creatives:
  1. Scroll down to the Top creatives card.
  2. Scan the highest-ranked creatives to see what messaging advertisers are using frequently.
  3. Click the title of a creative to open its landing page and see where the advertiser is routing traffic.
Recovering from an empty state:
  1. If you land on the page and see the “No ads data yet” screen, read the description explaining that only ChatGPT serves ads today and that tracking more commercial prompts increases your chances of capturing them.
  2. Click the Manage prompts button.
  3. Add new prompts that reflect high-intent, commercial searches where advertisers are more likely to bid.

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Empty, loading, and error states

  • No ads data yet: If your tracked prompts have never captured a single ad response, the entire page is replaced with a “No ads data yet” screen featuring an illustration of an ad in ChatGPT. It explains how ad capture works and offers a Manage prompts button to help you track more commercial searches.
  • No ads in this date range: If you have captured ads historically but there are none in your currently selected date filter, the dashboard renders a smaller empty state card stating “No ads in this date range.”
  • Table Empty States: If a search yields no results, or if the “Tracked” segment has no data, the tables show “No advertisers match…” or “No creatives found.”
  • Loading: While the page loads, skeleton placeholders appear for the hero card, stat tiles, and table rows. If your subscription access is still resolving, you will see a full-page neutral loading spinner.
  • Errors: If the dashboard data fails to load, a “Couldn’t load ads data” card appears with a Try again button. If an individual table fails, it displays “Couldn’t load advertisers/creatives” with a Try again link. If your plan entitlement fails to verify entirely, a full-page “Something went wrong” / “Couldn’t verify access” screen is shown.
  • Linked from: The main app sidebar navigation (under the “Ads” item).
  • Links to:
    • Responses page: Via the “View answers with ads” link, stat tiles, and prompt drilldowns inside expanded rows.
    • Prompts page: Via the “Manage prompts” button in the empty state.
    • External URLs: Clicking linked ad creatives opens the advertiser’s landing page in a new tab.

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Common support questions

Why is “Ads captured” higher than “Ads shown”? An engine might return an ad in the background data, but choose not to display it to the user. “Ads captured” counts everything the engine processed, while “Ads shown” only counts ads that were actually rendered on screen for the user to see. What does “Auctioned but not shown” mean? This means an advertiser successfully bid and won an ad slot for a specific prompt, but ChatGPT ultimately decided not to render the ad in the final answer. We still track this because it reveals who is actively bidding on your keywords. Why does an advertiser show up as “Unknown advertiser”? Occasionally, the system captures an ad but cannot resolve a normalized root domain or brand name from the creative’s data. These are grouped into an “Unknown advertiser” bucket. This row cannot be expanded. Why do I see the “No ads data yet” screen? Ad tracking only applies to ChatGPT, and ChatGPT typically only serves ads on highly commercial, transactional prompts. If you are tracking informational queries, you may not trigger any ads. Try adding more commercial prompts to your workspace. Can I see ads from Google AI Overviews or Perplexity? No. As noted in the page tooltips, only ChatGPT currently serves the sponsored ads tracked on this dashboard.