LinkedIn lets you pick job titles and companies, and charges for it. ChatGPT reaches people asking about the problem your product solves. Here is how the 2 compare for B2B.
LinkedIn is the most expensive channel here and the most precise for B2B. Across 153 B2B advertisers, the median was $9.39 per click and $202 per lead. ChatGPT cannot target by job or company, and people on paid ChatGPT plans, including Business and Enterprise seats, never see ads. B2B software is still the largest category of ChatGPT ads in the US.
| ChatGPT | ||
|---|---|---|
| How you target | Job titles, skills, years of experience, companies, and your own contact and company lists | Context hints that describe your offer, plus countries, regions, devices and customer lists |
| Smallest audience | 300 members, with 50,000 or more suggested | Customer lists need 25,000 matched users to target |
| Minimum budget | $10 a day. LinkedIn suggests $25 for new advertisers | $25 a day |
| Price per click | $9.39 median across 153 B2B advertisers | OpenAI suggests $3 to $5 |
| Cost per lead | $202 median | No official number |
| Who you cannot reach | People who are not on LinkedIn | Anyone on a paid ChatGPT plan, including Business and Enterprise |
LinkedIn says it has more than 1 billion members, 233 million of them in North America. You choose them by job title, skills, experience and company, and you can upload lists of the accounts you want to win. Audiences must have at least 300 members, and LinkedIn suggests 50,000 or more.
ChatGPT reaches the people asking it questions, and it cannot filter them by job or company. Ads show only on the Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu users never see them, and that removes many of the people who use ChatGPT at work. Your ad shows when your context hints match the conversation, so the problem your product solves does the targeting.
Metadata.io measured $57.6 million of spend by 153 B2B advertisers in 2025. The medians were $9.39 per click, $63.19 per 1,000 views, 0.67% click-through and $202 per lead. Leads from LinkedIn's own forms cost $193, against $346 for leads sent to a landing page. Document ads brought the cheapest leads, at $142.
The spend pays back slowly but well. Dreamdata, which tracks B2B revenue for its customers, measured a 121% return on ad spend for LinkedIn, against 67% for Google search and 51% for Meta. The average time from a first LinkedIn view to revenue was 281 days.
B2B software is the biggest category of ChatGPT ads in the US, with 19.9% of ad views among the top 10,000 advertisers. Monday.com had the largest share. That comes from Graphite and Similarweb's study of March to August 2026.
The results are split. In OpenAI's case studies, more than 10% of Jotform's ChatGPT clicks became signups, at a cost per signup about 60% below paid social and 30% below paid search. More than 70% of Stream's clicks became real website sessions, against less than 10% on every other channel Stream tested. Other public tests went the other way. One B2B advertiser spent $2,319 for 739 clicks and no qualified leads. A Canadian B2B company converted 0.9% of its ChatGPT clicks against 5.95% on Google.
In the public tests we found, the wins share a pattern. Jotform and Stream sell tools that one person can sign up for and start using. Leads that need a sales team, a demo and a long decision have done worse so far.
Keep it for your named accounts. Test ChatGPT on your lowest-friction offer, such as a free trial, a free tool or a template, and send each ad to the page about that one problem. Expect fewer qualified leads per click than on Google, and judge the test on cost per signup or cost per customer over at least a few weeks.
Based on each platform's own help pages and on the studies named below, as we read them on October 20, 2026. Prices and rules change often, so check the current numbers before you spend.
Sources: LinkedIn Marketing Solutions (budgets, audience), LinkedIn Help (audience size, bidding). Metadata.io, What LinkedIn ads cost, August 25, 2026. Dreamdata, LinkedIn Ads Benchmarks Report 2026, March 10, 2026. Graphite and Similarweb, The State of ChatGPT Ads, September 28, 2026. OpenAI customer stories (Jotform, Stream). Workshop Digital, ChatGPT ads for B2B, August 26, 2026. PPC ONE, ChatGPT ads results, updated October 14, 2026. Microsoft Advertising Help, LinkedIn profile targeting. OpenAI Help Center, ChatGPT Ads collection.
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