A new weekly dashboard from search intelligence firm Adthena puts a number on something the industry has only guessed at until now: how many brands are actually buying ads inside ChatGPT. The count for the week of July 13 to 20 is 7,378 distinct advertisers across the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. It is the first public, recurring measurement of a channel that did not exist six months ago.
The number that will get quoted matters less than the definition behind it. Adthena calculates each advertiser’s visibility percentage by dividing the prompts on which that advertiser appeared by the total prompts in the dataset. That is a share-of-prompts figure, not a share of impressions and not a share of spend. A brand that shows up once across many different prompts will outscore a brand that shows up repeatedly on a handful of prompts. Read the leaderboard as a measure of prompt-coverage breadth, not budget weight, or the rankings will mislead.
The market split shows a rollout still concentrated in its first market: the US holds 4,982 advertisers, the UK 1,342, and Australia 912, with a smaller rest-of-world bucket accounting for the remainder. Because many advertisers run in more than one market, the individual counts overlap rather than add up cleanly to the 7,378 headline figure.
The most instructive detail sits inside the US prompt data. The two most contested prompts each drew 23 unique advertisers, the densest competition Adthena recorded anywhere in the index. The prompt text behind those numbers clusters almost entirely in two categories: hospitality software and small business accounting. The specific queries include the cheapest Airbnb management software, how to pick a channel manager for short-term rental hosts, the best small business accounting software for 2026, a Hostaway-versus-Lodgify channel manager comparison, and a three-way matchup of Guesty, Hostaway and Lodgify.
Four of the five are software purchase decisions confined to one vertical, and two are explicit head-to-head vendor comparisons. That pattern lines up with how Adthena describes ChatGPT’s ad targeting: advertisers supply context hints, phrases describing the kinds of conversations where their product is relevant, rather than bidding on keyword lists. A prompt that names three competing vendors by brand is unusually easy for a context-matching system to read, which is likely why buyers have piled onto exactly those prompts. For a media planner, the practical shift is real. Campaign planning here means mapping the shapes of conversations customers have before a purchase, not building a keyword list and bidding it up.
The UK ranking breaks from every other market in the index. giffgaff leads at 14.0 percent visibility and Vodafone follows at 11.3 percent, two domestic telecom carriers that do not appear in the top three of the US, Australian or rest-of-world lists. Where the US and Australian leaderboards are dominated by international travel and comparison brands, the UK auction so far looks like it is being fought by incumbent national carriers defending home turf.
Adthena separately disclosed, ahead of a fuller report due July 27, that ChatGPT ad placements grew 97 times over from April to June, and that ChatGPT ad frequency in the US reached 24.7 percent against 5.8 percent for Google AI Mode. Treat the multiple with caution: no base figure accompanies it, so the absolute placement counts at either end of that window are undisclosed, and a 97-fold jump off a tiny starting point is still a small number in absolute terms. The pilot had passed roughly 600 advertisers by late April, which gives a sense of how low that base likely was.
For teams weighing a ChatGPT ad budget, the index is a coverage map, not a spend benchmark. The next ninety days are the moment to identify which of your category’s purchase-comparison prompts are drawing the most advertisers, since that is where context-hint competition will concentrate first.
Per a PPC Land report by Luis Rijo published July 23, 2026, citing data from Adthena’s ChatGPT Ads Share of Search Index.
