For years, advertising has been the silent engine that has allowed free access to much of the internet. It has funded search engines, websites, applications, and services that we use daily, establishing a norm in the digital environment. However, the arrival of chatbots and AI-based search engines is forcing a reevaluation of this balance, as the main product is no longer just content, but answers that users expect to be reliable. In this new scenario, any doubt about the influence of advertising on responses ceases to be a technical aspect and becomes a crucial issue. Trust versus monetization. In recent months, major AI companies have taken divergent stances: some have opted to include ads in their free services, while others reject them to avoid affecting user trust. This has created a division in the sector just when it needs to demonstrate its economic viability. The debate revolves not only around the profitability of AI but also the type of relationship established with users. Trust as a central axis. A clear example is Perplexity, which in 2024 experimented with sponsored responses in its chatbot but decided to remove them at the end of that year and currently states it has no intention of reintroducing them. According to statements to the Financial Times, the company believes that user trust in the quality of responses is essential for the product to be sustainable and that advertising could undermine that value, although they do not rule out reconsidering this strategy in the future. Advertising as a differentiator. Anthropic follows a similar line, advocating for the absence of ads in its chatbot and making this decision part of its public message. Before the Super Bowl, it launched a campaign with the slogan "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude," highlighting the discomfort that advertising insertion could generate in personal conversations and thus differentiating itself from competitors. Response from OpenAI. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, called Anthropic's campaign "clearly dishonest" and defended that its ad model will be transparent, with clearly identified advertising that does not interfere with responses. Altman argues that offering free access to AI requires new revenue sources and contrasts its mass access approach with Anthropic's model, which he considers more exclusive. Not everyone can avoid advertising. The development and maintenance of these systems involve high costs, which has increased the pressure to find sustainable revenue models. Therefore, some companies are testing the inclusion of sponsored content, always separated from the main responses, as seen in ChatGPT and in Google's new AI search formats. It is important to note that, for now, Google has not incorporated ads into its Gemini chatbot. Source: xataka.com