ChatGPT will sell your hotel a click for $3.50. The recommendation still isn't for sale.
Since May 5 any US hotel can buy a sponsored card under a ChatGPT answer, no minimum spend, a click from $3. The hotel the answer names is still chosen from the reviews.
by Markus Busch
You can buy in now. Until May, advertising in ChatGPT needed a $200,000 commitment, which kept it to Expedia and the big chains. On May 5 OpenAI dropped the minimum to nothing, opened a self-serve ads manager at ads.openai.com to any US business, and let advertisers pay per click. The cards show to people on the free plan and the cheap Go plan; anyone paying for Plus sees none. Targeting covers the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand.
What a single hotel gets to buy. One card. A square photo, a headline that cuts off around 24 characters, a line of description that cuts off around 48, a link to your site. You can aim it at a TV market, so a Gulf Coast hotel can buy conversations happening in Chicago in January. There are no keywords. You write a few sentences describing the conversations your hotel belongs in, "a family looking for a quiet beach with a kids' club," and OpenAI's own instructions say those sentences guide the match without controlling it. Bid under $3 a click and the system warns the ad may never show. Agencies in the program report a $25-a-day floor; OpenAI's help pages publish no minimum.
Where the card sits. Under the answer. A traveler asks for somewhere quiet on the coast, the assistant names its hotels, and below that, marked sponsored, one card appears. OpenAI's line is that the card leaves the paragraph alone. Which leaves the paragraph exactly where it was: built from the reviews, the Google profile, the Reddit threads, the record other people wrote about you. The ad buys the space beneath the sentence. The sentence still has to be earned.
The card with a price on it is a different product. In late July OpenAI began rolling out a richer card that shows a price and a star rating. That one runs off a product feed: the kind of file a shoe store uploads to Google Shopping, one line per item, with a price and an in-stock flag the seller keeps current. When the card shows, OpenAI picks one item from the file and prints its price. A single hotel can only run the plain card; the priced card needs the file. OpenAI's worked example is a running-shoe catalog, and nothing in its instructions describes a room, a night, or a rate that changes on Tuesday. Whether any hotel company or OTA is pushing rates through it is undocumented. What the instructions do settle is which card would carry an OTA's inventory, and that your rate sheet has no shape it can take yet.
What early hotel campaigns show. Cogwheel Marketing, a hotel agency in the program since June, published its client numbers on July 30: the card was clicked 16 to 19 times per thousand showings, clicks cost $3 to $3.50, and it was shown more than 20,000 times in under two months. Those are one agency's figures across unnamed properties, no sample size given, from a firm that sells AI visibility services. A first reading. The agency's own advice is the useful part: a hotel that already shows up in AI answers on its own should put the money somewhere else.
What it costs to find out. Before you spend anything, ask ChatGPT for a hotel like yours, in your town, the way a guest would. If it names you, keep the $25. If it doesn't, $25 a day buys a month under the answer for about $750. The name the assistant writes comes from the record, and the record is still free.
Read also: Booking.com embedded itself as ChatGPT's payment layer
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