> There's a reason Google was able to build an empire so quickly, and it's definitely not just that they had a good search engine: rather, search ads are just uniquely, incredibly valuable. Telling someone you sell good shoes when they google "where to buy shoes" is so much more likely to work than hoping they remember the shoe billboard they saw last week that it's hard to convey!

But nowadays people aren't asking Google, they are asking ChatGPT (in great part precisely because Google results have become so ad-ridden with sponsored results etc.).

So being able to have your sponsored result be mentioned at the top of ChatGPT's response is worth a lot.

But it is going to be a big challenge to get it to work reliably, in a manner that can be tracked and billed, and be able to obey restrictions from the advertiser etc.

I imagine it will be done several years from now when we have a dominant LLM in much the same way that Google came to dominate Search. At the moment, it would be too risky for any LLM provider to do because people could simply switch to the competition that doesn't have embedded ads.