Sponsored Answers in Perplexity and Copilot, Tested

Sponsored placements inside AI assistants are a consideration buy at roughly forty to sixty euros CPM with attribution materially weaker than paid search, and the correct starting size is under a tenth of your search budget, behind a geographic holdout. That is the answer, and most of what follows is how to test it rather than how to spend more on it. I have turned this work down twice for buyers who needed last-click parity with brand search inside a quarter. That is not what this inventory does. What is actually buyable: Perplexity sells sponsored follow-up questions and sponsored answer modules, where the brand supplies approved answer text and the model does not generate claims about you. That constraint is the product's best feature and the reason the format is usable in regulated categories at all. Microsoft Advertising places ads inside Copilot, bought through the same account and UET tag as your Bing search campaigns, which means conversion definitions, audiences and negative lists carry across and the comparison against search is at least like for like. Surfaces inside ChatGPT have moved repeatedly. I write only what the platform documents at the time of the engagement, and I will tell you when something is a rumour rather than a rate card. How the answer text is written: The unit is one paragraph that has to be correct standing alone, because a reader receives it as an answer and not as an ad. It carries one number the reader can check, one boundary saying who the thing is not for, and no claim your legal team has not already seen. Superlatives come out; an assistant surface punishes them harder than a results page does. For logistics and nonprofit buyers this usually means naming a lane, a transit time or a programme cost instead of a mission statement. Measurement: A country or region holdout for six weeks, sized before launch so we both know the smallest effect the test can detect and have agreed in advance what result would end it. Alongside it: assistant referral traffic isolated in GA4 by referrer host before the first euro is spent, branded impressions in your search brand campaign as the lift signal, and direct session volume as the noisy third read. I report the holdout result and the last-click number in the same document, and I say which one I would renew on. Not included: Getting cited in organic AI answers. That is a different discipline with a different toolkit, and selling it as a bonus attached to a media buy would misrepresent how either works. No pharma or prescription-adjacent claims. No creative production beyond the answer text and the brief for its destination page. No promise of placement share: the platform allocates inventory and neither of us controls that. Who this is not for: Anyone whose finance function will read a CPM channel as a search channel. Products with a purchase cycle short enough that lift disappears into normal weekly variance, and products with a cycle so long that six weeks cannot show anything either way. Buyers who want to be early in a format for the announcement; the reason to be here is that a defined audience asks assistants questions your category answers badly, and if that is not true of your category I will say so on the call and we can stop there. Reporting: Fortnightly during the test, with the holdout arithmetic shown rather than summarised, and a written recommendation to continue or stop at week six.