Advertising on AI surfaces, measured

Show up where people ask AI what to buy.

Millions of buying decisions now start inside ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity. Those answers can carry your ads. They can also recommend you for free.

MadContext works with e-commerce brands on both sides of that: we run the paid campaigns, and we make your products easier for assistants to recommend on their own.

What AI ads actually cost right now

The public record, August 2026 · every figure linked to its source
$3–5
per click — what e-commerce brands pay, the cheapest category. Software and finance companies pay $8–18.
~$45
per thousand views — today's average. Prices started at $60 in February 2026 and dropped 58% in ten weeks: this market is still finding its level.
1.49×
$1.49 back per $1 spent — the best result anyone has published, from ~$60K over 15 days. It comes from an agency selling these services [agency-published data], and its daily results swung from $0.20 to $2.90 per dollar.
Google's cost per click — what one merchant running it themselves reported paying, on a click-through rate under a tenth of what the same store gets from Google. [one store, one month]

A careful operator made money on it. Merchants running it themselves mostly didn't. What separates them is unglamorous — whether the product feed is clean, and whether conversions are tracked somewhere other than the platform's own dashboard. That's the part we work on.

Read the full research note →

Two things,
run together.

Paid placement and organic recommendation run on the same product data. Splitting them across two vendors means fixing the same feed twice.

Paid
01

AI ads, operated

Campaign strategy, build, and weekly optimization in your own ad accounts. You keep the billing, the data, and the history. We handle feed and catalog readiness, conversational targeting, and conversion tracking wired into your analytics rather than just the platform's dashboard.

Organic
02

Recommended, honestly

Disclosed answer-engine optimization. We restructure product pages and earn the third-party citations that make assistants actually recommend you. No fake reviews. No seeded posts. Everything we do holds up in daylight.

How an engagement starts

The 6-week pilot

Two slots. Terms written down before we ever talk, and they don't move.

Ask about the pilot →
Wk 1

Product feed, landing pages, and tracking audited and fixed. Baseline recorded.

Wk 2–5

Campaigns live in your account. Weekly readouts: spend, clicks, conversions, ROAS, with denominators. Organic recommendation work runs alongside.

Wk 6

Full readout and a straight recommendation: scale, adjust, or stop.

The money

Your ad budget is $1,500–$3,000 for the six weeks, spent from your own account. Our pilot fee is $750 flat, with no percentage of spend.

The accounts

You create and own your ad accounts and invite us as an operator, the one agency pattern the platforms' terms permit. Everything — data, history, billing — stays yours.

The stance

Every readout shows the platform's reported numbers next to independently-attributed ones. On a channel this young they will disagree, and you'll see the gap. If the channel isn't working for you at pilot scale, the readout says so and we recommend stopping. A clean negative result is a result.