ChatGPT ads are now rolling out to most advertisers in Australia. As more families use AI tools to research products and services, advertising is starting to show up inside those conversations too, and ChatGPT is quickly becoming a new discovery channel in its own right.
We've been watching it closely. Here's where we've landed, and why.
What ChatGPT ads actually look like
Right now, the ads are text-based and appear at the end of a ChatGPT response, marked “Sponsored.” If someone asks ChatGPT for help finding a service, a sponsored suggestion can show up alongside the AI's own answer. It's a genuinely new kind of ad placement: less “search result,” more “recommendation.”
For a lot of industries, that's an exciting shift. For childcare, we think it's too early.
The dealbreaker: there's no local targeting yet
Every location-based business lives and dies by geography. A childcare centre isn't competing for families across Australia, or even across a state. It's competing for families within a realistic drive-time of one physical address, usually a few kilometres at most.
That's exactly what ChatGPT ads can't do yet. Targeting is currently limited to country and state level only. There's no postcode or suburb targeting, and no way to set a radius around a centre the way Google and Meta both allow.
Without that, a ChatGPT ad campaign for a Melbourne centre could just as easily show to a parent in Geelong or Ballarat. Every impression outside a realistic catchment is budget that can't convert into an enrolment. For a business built entirely on proximity, that's not a minor gap. It's the whole targeting model.
Our call: not yet, but we're watching
Based on where the platform is today, we're not recommending clients trial ChatGPT ads. The channel itself is interesting, and the direction is clearly toward more AI-driven discovery. But without suburb-level or radius targeting, the ROI case doesn't stack up for a hyper-local business like a childcare centre.
This isn't a permanent no. It's a “not yet.” Ad platforms tend to roll out broad targeting first and narrow it down over time, and we'd expect location controls to improve as ChatGPT ads mature. We're tracking it, and we'll let you know the moment it becomes a genuinely viable channel for driving enrolments.
Where we're putting your budget instead
Google and Meta both let us target a specific radius around your centre, layer in demographics, and measure every enquiry back to the ad that drove it. That precision is what turns ad spend into enrolments, and it's still where we're focused.
If you're curious about what a well-targeted, well-tracked campaign could look like for your centre, send us a message, we'll have a chat.