See Which Competitors Advertise Inside Your ChatGPT Prompts

The question that pulls people into ChatGPT ad tracking is usually a jealous one. A rival shows up above you in a ChatGPT answer and you want to know if they paid for it. With prose mentions you cannot tell, because a mention is just a name in a sentence. With the sponsored slot you can tell, because the slot is a paid unit and the advertiser is recorded. Ads Radar inside Promptwatch is the report that records it, and it is built to answer exactly that question: who is buying into your prompts.

It does this by watching real ChatGPT answers and storing the sponsored units it sees, tagged to the prompt that produced them. There is no official OpenAI ad API feeding it, and no vendor has a partnership that gives them one. The data is observation, not a feed.

Start with the prompts that carry ads

The first view is the prompt list. Ads Radar can list the prompts whose answers contained sponsored ads, with an ad count and the latest capture time per prompt. This is the right place to start because it tells you which of your queries even have a paid surface. A prompt that has never returned a sponsored unit is not one to spend time on. A prompt that returns one often is where the auction is active.

Sort that list by ad count. The prompts with the most captured ads are the ones where competitors are buying repeatedly, which is a different signal from a one off. A rival who buys your branded prompt once may be testing. A rival who buys it every week is running a campaign.

Then look at who is buying

The next view is the advertiser list. Ads Radar lists advertiser root domains ordered by ad count, so you see the full set of brands buying into your prompt set, ranked by how often they show up. This is where you find the rival you did not know about, the one who is not in your SEO competitor set but is showing up in the paid slot inside ChatGPT.

For any one advertiser, you can filter the full ad list to just their domain and read every ad they have run on your prompts. Each row has the ad creative, the advertiser name, the landing page, the source response, and the position of the ad inside that answer. You are reading their actual copy, not a paraphrase of it. Save the exact string, because a paraphrase is a guess and a guess does not survive a client check.

Watch share of ads over time

A snapshot tells you who is buying now. A trend tells you whether a rival is gaining. Ads Radar can pull the top advertiser domains with daily ad counts, defaulting to the last 90 days, so you can read share of ads over time. A rival whose daily count is climbing on your branded prompts is a different problem from one whose count is flat.

This is the view that turns a list into a story. A competitor who held steady for a quarter and then doubled in the last month is running something new. A competitor who has been steady the whole time is just always there. The two need different responses, and you cannot tell them apart from a single capture.

Filter so the rows stay comparable

The report lets you filter by model, prompt type, and intent. Use the intent filter. A COMMERCIAL prompt and an INFORMATIONAL prompt are not the same auction, and a rival buying into COMMERCIAL prompts is closer to your paid search world than one buying into INFORMATIONAL ones. A BRAND_SPECIFIC prompt, where someone types your name, is the row to watch closest, because that is a rival buying your own demand.

Position in the response is another sort worth running. The top sponsored slot and the third one are not the same buy. If you only read "did a rival appear" you miss that two rivals can appear and one of them paid for the slot above the other.

Plans and limits

Ads Radar is a platform feature, not a standalone SKU. The commerce reports it sits beside are on Professional at $245/mo and above, and on the self serve agency plans (Kick-off $199, Growth $399, Scale $799). Essential at $95/mo does not include them. Explore is free with 10 ChatGPT prompts. Site: promptwatch.com.

What to do this week

1. Open the Ads Radar prompt list and sort by ad count.
2. Pick the three prompts with the most captured ads.
3. Open the advertiser domain list for those prompts and find the rival you did not expect.
4. Filter to that rival's domain and read their actual ad copy.
5. Pull the 90 day share of ads trend for that domain and decide if it is climbing.