Google’s AI Search Shift: The Current State of SEM
Should Arts Organizations Be Advertising on ChatGPT?
AUTHOR:
Jen Taylor
“Our patrons use ChatGPT—shouldn’t we be advertising there?”
It’s a question arts marketers are hearing more often. The short answer: probably not yet.
The platform is brand-new and still limited in its deliverability and measurement. However, it’s AI: it’s moving lightning fast, and we’re keeping an eye on the potential and future opportunities—some of which are detailed below.
Why We’re Not Recommending ChatGPT Ads Yet
The platform still has significant limitations.
Advertisers have reported substantial underdelivery, with some campaigns spending only a small fraction of their committed budgets. Measurement is also immature. CPA bidding remains limited, third-party verification is minimal, and ChatGPT-driven conversions often appear as direct traffic in analytics platforms.
It’s also too early to know whether conversational AI behaves like paid search. Some early research suggests AI-driven conversations may generate more qualified audiences, while other findings raise questions about conversion performance. Most available data comes from e-commerce, making it difficult to apply directly to arts and cultural organizations.
On June 4, ChatGPT announced an update to how memory will work, called dreaming. Memory used to remember discrete pieces of information. But now, in their words: “…in contrast to saved memories, dreaming leverages a background process that allows ChatGPT to learn from many conversations and synthesize ChatGPT’s memory state in order to always provide the freshest, most relevant context to your conversations.”
To me, personally, it feels like memory is potentially creating the groundwork for things like interest targeting in the future.
For now, there isn’t enough evidence to justify significant investment.
What Looks Promising
Despite these limitations, the platform is evolving quickly. OpenAI has rapidly expanded its advertising capabilities, adding self-serve campaign management, CPC bidding, geo-targeting, conversion tracking, and API integrations.
Travel and entertainment are already eligible categories, and Ticketmaster is participating in live-event advertising pilots.
The conversational format itself provides a unique opportunity and challenge for arts organizations. It will require us to truly “talk” the way their audiences do—we can’t be talking only about “repertoire,” “exhibitions,” and “galas,” if audiences are searching for “date-night ideas,” “family activities,” and “fancy events.”
ChatGPT’s audience skews younger, and even with ads only available to Free- and Go-tier users, it’s a large audience. That makes the platform more relevant for organizations trying to build relationships with future ticket buyers.
The Bigger Opportunity (Right Now): Organic Discoverability
For most arts organizations, the priority should be making sure ChatGPT can accurately understand, cite, and recommend them without paid advertising. Improving AI discoverability is valuable regardless of what happens with ChatGPT Ads.
What this actually means is: your SEO strategy still needs to be strong—in fact, that’s more true than ever. AI-based answers use a lot of the same architecture as Google, and SEO is at a critical point. To appear within these tools organically, you need to make sure your site is readable, understandable, and friendly to AI crawlers.
People are already using AI tools for discovery: 74% of Americans are using AI to search in some capacity at least once a week, with 36% using it every day. When someone asks for things to do in your city, your organization either appears in the response or it doesn’t. Too often, organizations surface with incomplete information, outdated details, or not at all.
A simple test: ask ChatGPT questions your audience might ask. If your organization is missing, misrepresented, or difficult to find, that’s the problem to solve first.
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When ChatGPT Ads May Become Worth Testing
We’re watching several developments that could change our recommendation:
- CPA bidding becomes widely available and viable for ticket sales and donations (meaning, it is possible to bid at CPAs that are reasonable for arts organizations’ ticket prices).
- Independent conversion data emerges for entertainment and experiences.
- Older, higher-income audiences begin using ChatGPT for event discovery at meaningful scale.
- Campaigns can reliably spend modest budgets.
- Arts organizations publish attributable revenue results.
Until then, the smarter investment is readiness. Focus on SEO foundations to increase discoverability, monitor the platform’s evolution, and be prepared to test when the evidence becomes stronger.
