ChatGPT ads, OAI-AdsBot, and Microsoft's AI push: a reality check for UK PPC managers

Three paid-search-meets-AI announcements landed in seven days. Here's what to act on, what to monitor, and what to ignore — for UK accounts.

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Three paid-search-meets-AI announcements landed in the past seven days. ChatGPT ads
opened to logged-out users with $3–$5 CPC bidding. OpenAI added OAI-AdsBot to its crawler
documentation. Microsoft pushed a new line on its AI ad strategy that more PPC managers
should be paying attention to.

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Each is being covered separately. They're more useful read together. Here's what they mean
for accounts running paid search out of the UK, and what to actually do this week — separated
by act-on, monitor, ignore.
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1. ChatGPT ads: $3–$5 CPC bidding, now serving logged-out users

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What changed: ChatGPT ads are now visible to users who aren't logged in, which expands
the addressable audience meaningfully. Alongside the rollout, OpenAI has published a CPC
bidding range of roughly $3 to $5 for the early auctions.

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What it means in practice. The CPC range is in line with what early test accounts have been
paying — not cheap, but not catastrophic for considered-purchase categories. The logged-
out expansion changes the math, because logged-out users are the bulk of incidental
ChatGPT traffic. If you ran a closed pilot in March and concluded "the volume isn't there,"
that conclusion may not hold any more.

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We've started seeing some early UK accounts get reasonable conversion volumes on B2B
SaaS and financial-services-adjacent queries. We've not seen ecommerce results worth
shouting about yet — the format still skews informational, and the buying journey on
ChatGPT isn't there for most consumer goods.

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Verdict: act on, with caveats. If you ran a pilot earlier this year and pulled it, look again. If
you're new to it, start with a £2k–£5k test budget on three to five high-intent prompt
categories. Don't expect Google-Ads-equivalent attribution — the conversion path is messier
and the data is thinner.

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2. OAI-AdsBot: the crawler nobody's blocking yet, but probably should know about

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What changed: OpenAI added OAI-AdsBot to its public crawler documentation. This is the
bot OpenAI uses to verify and serve ads on its platform — separate from OAI-SearchBot
(which crawls for search results) and ChatGPT-User (which fetches pages on behalf of
users).

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What it means in practice. If you're advertising on ChatGPT — or planning to — OAI-AdsBot
needs unblocked access to your landing pages. CDN bot rules that lump "AI crawlers"
together can silently block it, and your ad approval or quality scoring can suffer.

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For brands not advertising on ChatGPT, this is mostly informational. But there's a subtler
implication: the crawler list is now long enough that "block all AI bots" is a costly default.

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We've audited five client CDNs in the past month and three had an AI-bot block that was
applied broadly without anyone realising it was hitting OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot. The
same default would now block OAI-AdsBot too.

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Verdict: monitor, then decide. Run isitagentready.com or pull your CDN's bot-rule log this
week. If you're blocking AI bots wholesale, decide which ones you actually want to block —
there's a real difference between OAI-AdsBot serving ads, OAI-SearchBot indexing for
retrieval, and a generic LLM scraper.

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3. Microsoft's AI ad strategy: under-discussed, structurally interesting

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What changed: Microsoft put more weight behind a differentiated AI ad pitch this week —
Copilot integrations, Bing AI surfaces, and ad placements within productivity contexts (Word,
Outlook, Teams) where intent profiles are very different from search.

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What it means in practice. We've been undervaluing Microsoft Ads for years because the
volume on Bing Search is small. The Copilot story changes that argument. The audience that
pays for Copilot — enterprise IT decision-makers, productivity-focused professionals, B2B
buyers — is high-intent and underserved by Google Ads' surface area. Ad inventory inside
productivity workflows is a different surface from search-result pages, and the conversion
mechanics will be different too.

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We're not at the point where this displaces Google for any UK account we run. We are at the
point where it's worth allocating some test budget if your audience is B2B, professional
services, or enterprise software.

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Verdict: monitor, with light test budget if you're B2B. If you're DTC consumer, ignore for
now. If you're B2B/SaaS/professional services, allocate £1–2k to a Microsoft Copilot ads pilot
in the next quarter and report on it as a learning exercise rather than a performance line.

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What to do this week

● If you ran a ChatGPT ads pilot earlier this year: look at the data again with logged-out
users factored in. The conversion picture has changed.
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● If you're advertising on ChatGPT now: check that OAI-AdsBot has clean access to
your landing pages. Run your CDN's bot-rule log or use isitagentready.com.
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● If you're not advertising on ChatGPT: decide what your AI-bot policy actually is.
"Block all" is increasingly expensive. Pick which crawlers you allow and which you
don't, deliberately.
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● If you're a B2B account: put Microsoft Copilot ads on the Q3 test list. Don't drop
Google budget for it yet.
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● If you're a DTC consumer account: none of this is urgent. Stay close to your Meta and
Google numbers.

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FAQ

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Is ChatGPT ads' CPC actually $3–$5, or is that the floor?

That's the bidding range OpenAI is guiding. Real CPC depends on category competition.
We've seen UK B2B SaaS clear at the upper end and informational queries clear closer to
the floor.

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Should I block OAI-AdsBot if I'm not advertising on ChatGPT?

No reason to. It only fetches landing pages tied to ad accounts. Blocking it doesn't save you
anything and creates a problem if you decide to advertise later.

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Will Microsoft's Copilot ads matter for ecommerce?

Not yet. The audience is enterprise productivity, not consumer purchase intent. We'd be
surprised if that changed in the next six months.

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