By Kimeko McCoy  •  March 3, 2026  •

The digital wedding planning platform is one of the first brands to advertise on ChatGPT. OpenAI approached The Knot back in January to pilot the ad platform and the brand is working through its first batch of insights, according to Jenny Lewis, CMO at The Knot.

It’s early days, making ads within ChatGPT more about testing and learning, per Lewis. Notably, generative AI platforms like ChatGPT have upended search and marketers are only just now beginning to understand the ripple effects.

“I’ve been in the marketing world for long enough, in the tech world for long enough to know these things take time,” Lewis said on the Digiday Podcast. She later added, “Because of that, I have the perspective of: ‘we’ll go with them on this journey, as long as it’s something that we think our customers are seeking.’”

Digiday caught up with Lewis to talk about the ChatGPT ads pilot program, how The Knot is adapting its search marketing strategy for AI landscape and the launch of its new app within ChatGPT.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.

Questions, concerns and expectations

For us, first and foremost was safety — just brand safety, user safety, how we’re thinking about [it] and how [OpenAI intends] for us to show up and understand how data will be handled. Second was understanding the data that we would be getting back from the platform to help evaluate if this is effective or is it not. And then third is just the level of partnership and ensuring that we weren’t just going to be slotted in and never hear from them again, but that we would have recurring touch bases, which is our expectation of all the ad platforms that we partner with.

Control and customization

We did provide copy and imagery. We were able to pull most of the imagery from shoots that we’ve done in the past that were related to similar campaigns. Then the copy, we customized through our in-house copywriting team through the campaign.

Launching its app within ChatGPT

What we’re really trying to most understand is user adoption and behavior — especially with such light marketing — of how organically are people going to that app marketplace within ChatGPT, using The Knot app, calling upon it and trying to see more of the organic and evergreen adoption of it…certainly before we put a bunch of paid dollars behind it.

One of our end goals is to drive value back to our products. We’ll see as that continues to come to light of how that user behavior evolves. We want to be on the front lines of where innovation is happening, and clearly ChatGPT is one of thoes places.