Microsoft is exploring expanding ads in Bing Chat and sharing the ad revenue with partners whose content contributed to the chat response
It was inevitable, but Microsoft has confirmed that more ads are coming to Bing's AI-powered chatbot. Microsoft corporate vice president Yusuf Mehdi …
The VergeJay Peters
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft had already signaled to ad agencies that Bing’s chatbot could carry paid links and industry-specific placements. This proposal extends that early chat-based ad format by tying monetization to the third-party content used in an answer.
The key tension is not simply adding inventory: Microsoft’s ads leadership later addressed how to prevent chat results from becoming overly promotional, while Bing Chat’s wider rollout increased the surface on which that balance would matter.
First-order effects
Microsoft can test a commercial model for Bing Chat that combines ads with payments to content partners cited or used in responses.
Publishers and other contributing partners gain a potential route to be compensated for answer-engine usage of their material; advertisers gain a prospective conversational placement.
Second-order effects
Attribution and citation become economically important: partners will have stronger incentives to seek visibility in responses, while Microsoft must determine which contributions qualify for revenue sharing.
Advertisers and agencies will need formats and measurement that fit a chat response rather than a conventional results page, reinforcing concerns about keeping answers useful rather than promotional.
Third-order effects
If revenue sharing becomes a durable practice, AI search could move from sending traffic to publishers toward paying for content’s role as inference input—a different bargain for the open web.
The outcome will depend on whether answer engines can make sourcing, compensation, and ad labeling legible enough for publishers and users to accept the model.
The trend: This is one early step in answer-engine economics, where AI assistants must monetize synthesized answers while negotiating value with the content sources behind them.
Bing Chat now has Ads! It's going to be fascinating to see how the unit economics of Ads in language models will unfold and affect search advertising. 1/3 https://twitter.com/...
just imagining how ads could destroy every positive use case... me: “I've been feeling really depressed - the world just seems so bleak right now, you know?” ChatGPT: “you're not alone, Jesse - talk to your doctor about adding REXULTI...” https://twitter.com/...
Search ads, but in a chatbot. Maybe this will work, but it feels ironic that a paradigm shift in technology tacks on a business model from 1998. https://www.theverge.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Microsoft's Bing chatbot is getting more ads. The AI-powered search results launched with some limited ads inline and in shopping replies, but Microsoft is looking at adding more https://www.theverge.com/...
Cool. Ads in Bing Chat. Just great. I was wondering how one might make Bing Chat less authoritative and more vulnerable to exploitation for misinformation https://blogs.bing.com/...
You can run into the metaverse or into the hallucinating arms of Generative AI. One thing is sure. You can't escape ads. “Microsoft slips ads into AI-powered Bing Chat” https://techcrunch.com/...
This is not new, Bing Chat has shown these ads since day one - I've been tracking the ad formats at https://www.seroundtable.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
Given —the click through rates / conversions on these ads aren't comparable to search —LLM-powered chat is eating into search as a information retrieval medium it could radically reduce the size of the $100B+ search advertising industry, unless.. 2/3