For two decades, the language of digital advertising in Australia has been written almost entirely by Google. Cost per click, quality score, click-through rate, last-click attribution: these are the numbers that marketing teams from Parramatta to Perth live and die by, and they are the numbers that boards understand when they sign off on a media budget. Now a new advertising surface is arriving, and an Australian agency is warning that reaching for the familiar Google yardstick could quietly drain money from campaigns before anyone realises what has gone wrong.
The caution centres on advertising inside ChatGPT, the conversational assistant built by OpenAI that has become a daily habit for millions of Australians. As OpenAI edges toward carrying commercial messages within its chat experience, agencies here are starting to game out what paid placements might look like, and how anyone would judge whether they worked. The agency’s argument, reported by Medianet News Hub, is blunt: force a chatbot into a search-engine measurement model and you will misread its value, most likely to the downside.
Two very different ways of finding an answer
To see why the warning matters, it helps to remember what a Google search actually is. A person types a few keywords, scans a page of ten blue links and a handful of ads, then clicks. Every step is discrete and countable, which is exactly why Google’s metrics reward the click. The whole apparatus assumes that the moment worth measuring is the instant a user leaves the search page for a website.
A conversation with ChatGPT does not work like that. A shopper researching a new mattress, a small business owner comparing accounting software, or a family planning a holiday might spend several minutes in a back-and-forth exchange, refining what they want, asking follow-up questions and having options summarised for them. Often they never click anything at all. The assistant does the comparing, the filtering and sometimes the recommending, and the user walks away with a decision half made. If a brand appears helpfully inside that dialogue and the person later buys without ever registering a trackable click, a Google-style dashboard will record close to nothing. The spend looks wasted when it may have done real work.
That is the crux of the agency’s caution. Click-through rate and last-click attribution were built for a world of links, not a world of dialogue. Judging conversational placements by whether someone clicked risks systematically undercounting their influence, prompting marketers to switch off campaigns that are actually shaping demand, and to keep pouring money into channels that merely capture demand already created elsewhere.
The counter-view: prove it first
Not everyone in the industry is ready to rewrite the rulebook. A more sceptical camp points out that OpenAI has yet to spell out a mature advertising product, pricing model or measurement standard, and that talk of a new marketing paradigm has a habit of running ahead of the reality. Advertisers have heard grand claims before about formats that would render the click obsolete, from immersive rich media to the metaverse, and many of those promises never justified the budgets shifted their way.
There is also a legitimate accountability concern. Chief financial officers do not hand over money on the strength of vibes, and the great virtue of Google’s much-maligned metrics is that they are auditable. If conversational advertising is going to ask brands to accept softer signals such as brand lift, assisted consideration or share of recommendation, it will need to show that those signals are measured rigorously and not simply invented to make a new channel look good. Until OpenAI and the agencies serving it produce a credible framework, cautious marketers are right to demand evidence before they move spend.
What it means for Australia
Australia is an unusually concentrated and Google-dependent advertising market, which makes this a live question rather than an academic one. Local businesses, and particularly the small and medium firms that make up the bulk of the economy, have spent years building their entire growth model on paid search. Agencies, in-house teams and the reporting tools they rely on are all wired for the click. A format that resists that logic will not just require new creative thinking, it will require new spreadsheets, new key performance indicators and, most awkwardly, a new conversation with the finance department.
Australian regulators are watching the broader shift too. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has spent much of the past decade scrutinising the power of digital platforms over advertising and the opacity of how ad dollars are measured and attributed. A move of commercial messaging into AI assistants raises fresh versions of old questions about transparency, disclosure and whether users can tell paid content from neutral advice. For Australian consumers, the line between a genuine recommendation and a sponsored one becomes harder to see when it is delivered in the friendly, authoritative voice of a chatbot, and that is precisely the sort of blurring that has drawn regulatory attention before.
There is a competitive angle as well. Early movers who learn to measure conversational advertising properly could gain an edge while rivals are still arguing about click-through rates. Australian brands that treat the arrival of ChatGPT advertising as a chance to rethink measurement, rather than as another line item to bolt onto the existing Google report, may find themselves better placed as more consumer research migrates into AI tools.
What is next
The immediate task for Australian marketers is not to rush budget into a product that barely exists yet, but to prepare the thinking before it does. That means deciding, in advance, what a good outcome from a conversational placement even looks like, and how it would be captured without leaning on the reflex of the click. It means pressure-testing any measurement standard OpenAI eventually offers, and insisting on independent verification rather than platform-supplied numbers.
The larger point the agency is making is one Australian businesses have faced with every media shift from print to search to social: the metric that worked for the last channel rarely fits the next one cleanly. ChatGPT advertising may or may not become a major line in local media plans, but if it does, the firms that measured it on its own terms will be the ones who can tell their board, with a straight face, whether the money was well spent.
Sources: Medianet News Hub.
