Analyst argues OpenAI must develop deep intent analytics to rival google's advertising dominance

The piece posits that for OpenAI to achieve the commercial scale of Google, it must solve the advertising data problem. Google’s search business alone generated $225 billion in advertising revenue last year, with the entire company bringing in nearly $295 billion in advertising revenue last year. This dwarfs the $2.9 billion annual revenue of The Trade Desk, the largest independent demand-side platform. While ChatGPT captures high-intent user queries—such as specifying needs, constraints, and budgets for items like a sweater—OpenAI currently lacks the advertiser's map of that intent. Google provides advertisers with reports detailing which searches led to customers, allowing for negative keyword blocking. OpenAI must build analytics to categorize consumer intent from prompts, showing advertisers whether users are exploring, comparing, or ready to act. The author notes that while privacy is a concern, Google has successfully managed this by aggregating and bucketing rare queries. If OpenAI can roll up commercial patterns into categories while keeping individual conversations private, it could compete for the high-value paid search budget, which is currently reserved for platforms that can prove intent-based outcomes.