4% of observed ChatGPT ads had no meaningful connection to the response in Seer’s updated July 2026 scoring

Audience targeting

of observed ChatGPT ads had no meaningful connection to the response in Seer’s updated July 2026 scoring

Reader Note:: Seer scored ad-to-response fit with its own 1-to-5 rubric, where score 1 means 'No Meaningful Connection,' scores 2-3 mean 'Category-Adjacent,' and scores 4-5 mean 'On Topic.' In the updated July 2026 pull, score-1 ads fell to 4% from 22% in the earlier pull. The report does not publish the rubric in full, how many ads were hand-scored, or how consistently the scoring was applied.
Evidence:: Observed behaviour
Vendor interest:: Moderate — This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
Sample:: About two weeks of data from Seer's own AI tracker and client AI tracking workspaces; ads visible in 96 of 97 workspaces; 3,697 unique advertisers counted. Prompt selection and total tracked responses not fully disclosed.

Good for

Comparing yourself against a similar segment, and choosing what to test next.

Saying that one thing caused another, or predicting what you would get.
This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
The source never says how this number was measured.
Nobody counted this directly — it's a calculation. The publisher worked it out itself, or took the ad platform's word for what its ads achieved.
The source says how much it looked at, but not how any of it was chosen.

Prompts that name a brand are much more likely to show an ad

ChatGPT Ads: Share of prompts naming a brand, split by whether a competitor ad appeared (%)
Outcome	Names a Brand (%)	Names No Brand (%)
An Ad Appeared	61%	39%
No Ad Appeared	36%	64%

ChatGPT accounts in lower-income US ZIP codes were more likely to be shown ads

7.3%

of a brand’s own prompt responses showed that brand’s ad after about two weeks of Seer’s July 2026 tracking

Our Substack turns the data behind these cards into full breakdowns: what changed, why, and what to do about it.

55%

of Dreamdata customers use LinkedIn Matched Audiences to run ads in 2025

24%

of prompts showed an ad for the median exposed ChatGPT account after its first ad during March 8–31, 2026

58%

of observed ChatGPT ads were only category-adjacent to the response in Seer’s updated July 2026 scoring