If ChatGPT captures 5% of search, India’s ad market may have to follow

New Delhi: India loves two things very dearly. A good deal and a good shortcut.

For years, the shortcut to attention has been predictable. Want intent? Buy Google Search. Want scale? Buy Meta. Want video reach? Buy YouTube. Want “shopping intent”? Pay the toll at Amazon and Flipkart. Now, there’s a new road opening up. Quietly. And with a lot of potential to mess with the old maps.

OpenAI has started testing ads in ChatGPT in the US. The early format is simple: you ask a question, you get an AI answer, and ads appear below the response, marked clearly as ads. Not inside the answer. Not disguised. Just sitting there like a polite suggestion.

But don’t let the simplicity fool you. In advertising, where the ad appears matters. And when it appears matters even more.

ChatGPT ads are arriving at the exact moment a person is thinking, comparing, deciding, doubting, planning, and almost-buying. That’s not “reach”. That’s influence. And India, loud, mobile-first, commerce-hungry, is exactly the kind of market where this could get interesting fast.

India’s ad money isn’t small. It’s restless

India’s digital ad spend is already huge and still growing fast. According to the latest WPP TYNY forecast, it is expected to touch Rs 71,710 crore in 2026. This is the part of the market where marketers are most flexible, most experimental, and most addicted to dashboards.

So when ChatGPT ads land here, the first question won’t be “Is it cool?” The first question will be, “which budget pays for this?”

Darshana Shah, Group CMO, Aditya Birla Capital, laid it out clearly where this money will come from, at least at the start.

“Today, it sits squarely within the SEO budget, plain vanilla SEO and organic search, covering native content creation and everything that goes with it. That’s where we’re all looking to place it,” she said.

ChatGPT ads won’t create a new budget, but it will rearrange an existing one. Search money will move before anything else, not because marketers are bored, but because user behaviour is shifting, and marketing is basically the art of following people around the internet.

“Marketers will do it. We don’t really have a choice. Marketers follow users,” Shah said, adding that users are increasingly going on ChatGPT to search and are landing less on Google for it.

What Shah is pointing to is a preview of what’s coming. This isn’t just “search”; it’s search with a brain. Traditional search trained users into a predictable loop. Search, scan links, open multiple tabs, compare, click, and buy. Conversational AI fundamentally changes that flow.

It feels less like browsing and more like thinking out loud.

Sharing her thoughts with BestMediaInfo.com, Rubeena Singh, Managing Director, NP Digital, said, “The industry is moving away from ‘Search, Compare, Click’ toward ‘Ask, Reason, Recommend.” It changes what marketing needs to do, because keywords are messy, people don’t speak in keywords, people speak in problems.

They say things like, “I need a laptop for video editing under Rs 80,000”, “Which sunscreen won’t make me sweat like a maniac?”, “Is it worth refinancing my loan right now?” These aren’t “search terms”. These are situations. And ChatGPT is built for situations.

That is why Shah called it “a whole new discovery game.” “From an era of keyword tagging to one driven by large prompts. Long-form is back,” she said. And when long-form returns, content has to mature with it.

“Everyone is learning, agencies included, how to write content that is genuinely specific. You have to think from the consumer’s lens. What questions they’re actually asking, and start building content around those queries,” Shah told BestMediaInfo.com.

“That’s why it’s called generative optimisation,” she added, stating that “the money is already starting to move there.”

The big shift is simple. Ads won’t interrupt. They’ll arrive

Social media advertising currently works through your scrolls and swipes. ChatGPT advertising is slated to work with your queries and thoughts. To put things in perspective, while social media is currently behaving like a cunning salesman, ChatGPT is promising to become a helpful shopkeeper, who suggests and does not interrupt.

Carol Goyal, Chief Growth Officer at Aesthetic Intelligence Lab (founded by Rediffusion), explained the mechanics clearly.

“ChatGPT ads will appear at the bottom of responses rather than being embedded within the conversational text itself. This shift marks a significant move from traditional search-engine marketing towards ‘conversational’ or ‘intent-driven’ advertising,” she noted.

On Instagram, people are half-bored, half-distracted. On ChatGPT, people are trying to solve something.

Shining light on this psychological difference, Goyal said, “Unlike social media, where users scroll passively, ChatGPT users are actively searching for solutions to specific problems. Ads can now be placed at the precise moment a user is researching a product or service. So this is the start of ‘conversational intent’ placement.”

Conversational intent placement is expensive, and this is what marketers fight over. Intent is why Google Search became a money-printing machine. And now ChatGPT is walking into that room.

Adding to the conversation, Shah noted that while customers now have more options, this shift could increasingly pose a direct challenge to Google Search.

So what happens to budgets? Who loses first?

Let’s not pretend marketers will suddenly stop spending on Meta or YouTube. That’s not how this works. What will happen first is simpler. Search budgets will split.

“The search budget that traditionally went to Google will start getting redistributed, depending on how much shifts to platforms like ChatGPT. Search will be the first area to see this reallocation, as performance-led spends begin to follow,” noted Shah.

And if that shift still feels theoretical, Singh from NP Digital India, put a number to it that makes the stakes clear. “If ChatGPT captures even 5% of India’s search volume within the next 18 months, it becomes impossible for marketers to ignore,” she stated.

Google Search is the most exposed because it owns the “I want to buy something” moment. Meta is safer, for now, because it owns the “I didn’t know I wanted this but now I do” moment.

“From Meta’s point of view, I don’t see it being disrupted initially, because the behaviour is very different. It isn’t about keyword search and advertising, it’s about content consumption, like watching reels,” said Shah.

A larger question is whether ChatGPT’s impact extends beyond search into shopping intent. Shah described a user journey where planning increasingly happens on the platform. “When I search on ChatGPT, I do most of my planning there. Clicking on the ad then takes you to the platforms where you’re selling.”

However, she pointed to a potential next phase, where the platform itself could move closer to the point of transaction. If that happens, the implications would go well beyond search.

Categories that will grab this new ‘platform’ first

Every new ad channel has early adopters, and ChatGPT ads will too. But unlike the usual cycle where one or two categories test, fail, and quietly move on, this one has the potential to pull entire sectors into it because of the nature of the product itself.

ChatGPT isn’t a place people “hang out” in. It’s a place they go when they need answers. That alone changes who shows up first and why. Singh, for instance, believed adoption will be led by categories where decision-making is naturally research-heavy and conversational. 

“BFSI, travel and e-commerce will lead this adoption in India. These are categories where purchase decisions are research-heavy and conversational guidance adds tangible value,” she said.

According to Shah, D2C brands and quick-commerce players will be the first to adopt it, and will do so quickly, given that they are born-digital businesses for whom the shift is an obvious fit.

This is the key. Research-heavy categories love ChatGPT because ChatGPT feels like a smart friend who won’t judge you for asking basic questions, and when people ask better questions, ads get better signals.

Singh spelled out the conversion advantage. Zooming in, she said, “Conversion rates should be higher because queries are longer and more specific. Someone asking for the ‘best credit card for international travel with lounge access’ signals far stronger intent than a generic search.”

And eventually, as Shah predicted, “it will cut across categories, from fashion and home to cars. That’s how people are buying today. It’s exactly mirroring what Google did earlier, with GPT now disrupting that behaviour.” 

ChatGPT is designed to answer you, not send you away. So what happens when people get what they need inside the chat? 

Carol Goyal called it early. “Going forward, as users find answers directly within the chatbot, they may not click through to websites. Advertisers will therefore need to focus on branding within the chat response rather than just driving traffic to a landing page. That is a big change in thinking,” Goyal told BestMediaInfo.com.

That is a massive shift, because Indian digital advertising is currently obsessed with clicks, CTR, CPC, landing pages, and attribution models that assume the web is full of exits and entries.

ChatGPT changes that. The decision could happen inside the conversation, which means brands need to stop shouting and start helping.

“For brands, the shift represents a need to move away from ‘megaphones’ and toward ‘mentors’ - creating educational, structured, and helpful content that conversational engines can easily understand and reference,” Goyal added.

What marketers will demand?

India won’t spend serious money without serious measurement, and Shah expects OpenAI to build the full stack.

“I’d like to believe they will offer the full gamut. Dashboards, panels to run ads, and the entire ecosystem. Marketers will expect that level of transparency and usability to feel confident about increasing spend,” she said.

Singh, stressing the same point from a performance and analytics angle, said, “For brands to scale this, we will need transparent metrics and seamless integration into existing analytics.” In India, the money moves fast but only when the reporting is clean.