Alex Melen speaks on advertising inside AI answers: the paid placements now appearing in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity. His view, from SmartSites' early pilots across its client base, is that these placements are discovery media rather than search media, that cost per lead rather than cost per click is the number to watch, and that marketers should run small structured tests now so they have a measurement framework before budgets move.
How ads work inside ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity, where early adopters are winning and where brands are wasting spend, and a practical testing and measurement framework for a channel with no traditional SERP.
ChatGPT ads are sponsored placements that OpenAI shows to free-tier users alongside an AI answer, clearly separated from the answer itself and limited to one advertiser per result.
Alex's advice is to test with a small, capped budget and a clear measurement plan rather than wait: the inventory is new, the auction is thin, and the teams that learn the placement early will set budgets with data when the channel matures.
Treat them like discovery media: track assisted conversions and cost per lead in GA4 with clean UTM tagging, compare against your existing search and social benchmarks, and expect attribution to be partial because many AI clicks arrive as direct traffic.
Alex builds every session for the room. Send the event, audience and dates and he will come back with a proposed talk.