A Practical Guide to Advertising on OpenAI and Google Gemini

For most of the last two decades, “paid search” meant one thing: bidding on keywords in Google Ads. That definition is expanding. As conversational AI assistants become a genuine destination for product research and recommendations, advertising surfaces are opening up directly inside them — and the brands that learn this channel early get to write the playbook everyone else copies later.

What LLM advertising actually is

Rather than bidding on a search term to appear above ten blue links, LLM advertising means securing sponsored placement or visibility within an AI assistant’s response — on platforms including OpenAI’s and Google’s Gemini advertising surfaces. Instead of a headline and a display URL, the unit of creative is closer to a well-crafted, conversational recommendation: concise, contextually relevant, and built to hold up next to an AI-generated answer rather than compete with a wall of search results.

Who this is right for

LLM advertising isn’t a fit for every budget yet, but it’s worth serious consideration if any of the following describe your business:

• Your buyers already research high-consideration purchases (software, services, big-ticket products) by asking AI assistants direct questions
• You’re already investing in AEO/GEO and want a paid channel to complement organic citation efforts
• You compete in a category where being recommended by name carries real weight with buyers
• You want to establish a first-mover position in a channel that will only get more competitive and expensive over time

How to think about a first budget

Treat an initial LLM ad budget the way you’d treat testing any new paid channel: as a structured experiment, not a full reallocation of your media spend. Start with a defined test period, a small number of clearly scoped use cases or product lines, and success metrics agreed on before launch — whether that’s assisted conversions, branded search lift, or direct attribution where the platform supports it. Expand the budget once you can show the channel is doing something your other paid channels aren’t.

What we manage for clients

Running LLM ad campaigns well means treating them with the same rigor as any performance channel: clear targeting logic, creative written specifically for a conversational format rather than repurposed banner copy, disciplined budget pacing, and reporting that ties spend back to real business outcomes rather than impressions alone. That’s the standard we hold every LLM advertising engagement to.