Wealthy Bank's securities analyst Ken Gawrelski made a striking prediction in the latest report: by 2030, ChatGPT will account for 30% of the global search advertising market, with annual revenue approaching $100 billion. This prediction means that the competition between OpenAI and Google in the search market will intensify.
The report pointed out that the entire search advertising market is expected to grow at an annual compound rate of 8% over the next few years, reaching $340 billion by 2030. ChatGPT's rapid growth will mainly affect Google's market share. Currently, OpenAI's income mainly relies on user subscription fees. As early as March this year, insiders revealed that OpenAI expects its revenue to grow threefold this year, reaching $12.7 billion. At the same time, although it is expected that revenue will reach $125 billion by 2029, OpenAI will still not be able to achieve positive cash flow before 2029.
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Currently, ChatGPT has accounted for nearly 8% of global search queries, but has not yet had a significant impact on the search advertising market. Gawrelski believes this situation is about to change. They expect OpenAI to integrate sponsored ads into ChatGPT within the next 12 months. Notably, this popular AI tool already has more than 500 million weekly active users, but only 5% are paying users. In OpenAI's internal revenue forecast, "free user monetization revenue" in 2026 is expected to reach $1 billion, and this number will undoubtedly mainly come from advertising revenue.
The report also pointed out that as ChatGPT's share of overall search volume gradually increases, it is expected to reach about 17% by the end of 2025 and approach one-third by 2030. However, the growth of advertising share will lag behind usage growth in the short term, and the two are expected to balance out by the end of the forecast period. Gawrelski compared ChatGPT's commercialization process with TikTok, which also experienced a similar process of advertising revenue growth.
Currently, Google dominates over 90% of the search advertising market, but this number is expected to drop to around 60% by 2030. The report also warned that ChatGPT's entry may put downward pressure on the price of current popular pay-per-click (CPC) ads. Analysts pointed out that a 1% decrease in Google's ad prices could result in a 1% decrease in earnings per share for fiscal year 2026.
In order to accelerate its entry into the advertising market, ChatGPT may push this process through key catalysts such as new distribution agreements with mobile phone manufacturers and the U.S. court's ruling on Google's antitrust case.
