Ads intelligence

Ads is the sponsored layer of your answers: which advertisers ChatGPT renders paid units for when answering your tracked prompts, which of them bid on prompts that name your brand, and the creative cards behind each unit — every row traceable to the answer it rendered with.

What it does

ChatGPT serves sponsored advertiser units inside consumer answers on commercial-intent questions. MentionFlow extracts the engine-stated advertiser identity (name, link, favicon) and its creative cards from the engine payload at collection time and stores them durably, so the page can aggregate them across any date range:

• a KPI strip — distinct advertisers, answers with ads, ad coverage, branded-prompt bidders;
• a "Bidding on your branded prompts" card — advertisers whose units rendered on prompts that name you, with the exact prompts;
• an advertiser leaderboard — answers, share, window delta, prompts, branded hits, no-mention answers, creatives, last seen;
• a per-advertiser drawer — every distinct creative (verbatim title, body, destination) and the newest answers the unit ran with, each linking to its receipt;
• a weekly ad activity card — answers-with-ads among ad-stating answers per week, with distinct advertisers. Weeks with no ad-stating answers show an em-dash (unknown, not 0%), and range-clipped edge weeks are flagged partial.

How to use it

• Watch the branded-bidders card first. An advertiser paying to appear on "is YourBrand worth it" is conquesting your brand traffic — that's the sharpest signal on the page.
• Filter to "Ads without your mention." These are answers where someone paid to be present and you weren't mentioned at all — the paid version of a visibility gap. The chip's count shows how many answers qualify before you click.
• Open the drawer on any row to read the actual creatives and jump to the answers they rendered with.
• Scope by engine with the shared multi-select. Only ads-reporting engines are listed — an engine that never states ad placements could only ever produce an empty page.
• Read the weekly card for the trend. The weekly ad activity card plots answers-with-ads among ad-stating answers per week — the same honest denominator as ad coverage, so a week no ad-stating answer landed in shows an em-dash, not 0% (its tooltip explains why that week has nothing to measure). Weeks clipped by the range edge are flagged partial (*), and a single measured week is labelled a snapshot, not a trend — capture began July 2026, so earlier weeks can't appear.

How it's computed

Everything on this page is engine-stated, never inferred:

• Capture. ChatGPT's data records carry an ads object on every answer — the advertiser and its creatives when a sponsored unit rendered, an explicit empty shape when the answer ran ad-free. The collection pipeline stores one durable row per stated unit (advertiser, link, favicon, creatives, verbatim) keyed to the run, prompt, and brand. Ad-free answers store no row — the per-answer tri-state presence flag already records them.
• Identity. Advertisers group by their stated link's hostname (falling back to the stated name). A unit that stated creatives but no advertiser pools into a single "Not stated" bucket — shown as such, never guessed apart.
• Ad coverage counts only answers whose engine states ad presence either way. ChatGPT is the only such engine today; other engines' answers are an honest unknown that stays out of the denominator — with zero capable answers the tile shows an em-dash, never a fake 0%.
• Branded-prompt bidders are advertisers with at least one unit on a branded prompt in the window.
• Deltas compare against the prior equal-length window and appear only when a full prior window exists — never against a truncated baseline.

Honesty limits, stated on the page itself:

• Capture began July 2026. Earlier answers can never appear here; an empty older window means not captured, not ad-free. See data honesty.
• No spend estimates. Some tools model "estimated ad spend" tiers; we have no grounded signal to model spend from, so the page deliberately shows none.
• The engine states at most one advertiser unit per answer — creative cards are variants of the same advertiser, so "answers with ads" counts placements, not creatives.

Limits

• The drawer shows the newest 12 answers and up to 24 distinct creatives per advertiser.
• There is no plan gate.

Related

• Answers — the receipt each ad unit renders on, sponsored card included.
• Prompts — the Signals column's ads share aggregates the same per-answer presence flag.
• Shopping — the organic product carousels next to this page's paid units.
• Date ranges — the topbar range governs this page.
• API resources · MCP server — the same captured units over GET /api/v1/ads and the list_ads tool (additive, 2026-07-21).