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- December 23, 2025
For years I have had the same question thrown at me: if we spend money on Google PPC, will it help our organic rankings? My answer has always been fairly straightforward. Yes, in a nuanced and very indirect way. Running PPC can force you to improve landing pages, site speed or general experience, which helps organic.
But the spend itself has never been a ranking factor. Not running PPC does not hurt you, and unless you have the kind of budget that lets you splash your brand across the entire internet or influence an entire election cycle, paid ads do not move organic visibility. For almost every business, the answer has always been no.
Lately, though, I have been thinking about this question again, but in a completely different context. Not Google. ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI search in general, and I am realising that I cannot give the same confident answer anymore.
The landscape is shifting fast. People are using ChatGPT for discovery. OpenAI is clearly investing a huge amount into pushing its own version of web visibility and retrieval. And at some point, fairly soon, ChatGPT will launch paid ads. We all know it is coming. Once that happens, the old PPC question starts to feel a bit more complicated.
Google spent over 20 years building a very clear separation between paid and organic. Two systems, two teams, two ranking models, two sets of incentives.
LLMs do not have that history. They do not have a legacy search architecture designed around keeping those parts of the ecosystem separate.
Right now, LLMs retrieve content based on embeddings, citations, relevance, entity clarity and general signal strength. Paid spend has no impact on any of that. But once ads enter the picture, I am not convinced we can assume the same level of separation we are used to in traditional search. There is nothing in the foundations of LLM based search that guarantees it.
If a client asked me today, or tomorrow, whether paid ChatGPT ads will influence organic visibility inside AI generated answers, my honest reply would be very simple. I do not know yet. It might not matter at all. It might create indirect effects we do not fully understand. It might change how discoverability signals feed back into the model. Until ads are actually live in ChatGPT, anything beyond that is just guesswork.
And that is why I am thinking about this now, before clients and peers start asking the same question. AI search is not built on the same rules as classic search, and the relationship between paid and organic might not follow the patterns we are comfortable with.
I do not have the full answer, but I am keeping an eye on it. It is better to say that openly than pretend we already know how a brand new system will behave.
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