Context Hints — Context is the new interest targeting for the LLM era. Advertise inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.

The shift

Context is the new interest targeting — because LLMs made context the most accurate signal on the internet.

For fifteen years, performance marketing ran on a simple premise: stalk a person across the web, label them with an interest, and serve them a message tuned to that label. That world is ending. Cookies are deprecated, identifiers are walled, attribution is broken, and the next generation of buyers no longer starts at a search bar — they open a chat with an LLM. Every prompt they type is a multi-thousand-token context window that already contains their role, their problem, their constraints and their next move. The interest cohort is gone. The context remains — and it is richer than any audience graph ever was.

The old interest-graph is brittle by design. A user who searched for hiking boots in March is still classified as an "outdoor enthusiast" in August, long after they bought the boots, twisted an ankle, and moved on. Interest targeting is a memory of who someone used to be. Context is a snapshot of who they are right now, mid-question, mid-decision, mid-purchase.

Inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, a user does not arrive with a cookie. They arrive with a sentence. "What's the best CRM for a 12-person fintech startup that needs HIPAA compliance?" That sentence is more valuable than every behavioural signal a DMP collected on them in the previous decade. It contains the company size, the industry, the regulatory constraint, the product category, the buying stage, and the urgency — all volunteered, all fresh, all directly in the path of a purchase decision.

"Interest tells you what someone liked. Context tells you what they're trying to do this minute. One is archaeology. The other is intent."

Context Hints was built on a single belief: the next decade of advertising will be won by the platforms that can read context — accurately, in real time, across surfaces — and respond with a relevant offer before the conversation moves on. We do not target users. We target moments of meaning: a question, a comparison, a hesitation, a "what should I pick?" That moment is when ad spend finally earns its name.

The implication for budgets is dramatic. Traditional interest audiences have a CTR floor and a conversion ceiling: most of the people you reach were never going to buy. Contextual placement inside an AI conversation inverts the funnel. The user has already articulated a need. The model has already begun to recommend. The ad does not interrupt — it completes the answer.

The old playbook vs. the new context

Two ways to spend a million dollars on demand. Only one of them still works.

Legacy

Interest targeting

Built on cookies that no longer exist
Labels users by historical behaviour
Decays in days, retrains in weeks
Pays to interrupt unrelated content
Attribution lost across walled gardens

Context Hints

Context targeting

Reads the live conversation, not a cookie
Matches present intent and stage
Refreshes every prompt, every turn
Appears inside the answer, not beside it
Direct click-to-outcome attribution

7.4×

Higher conversion rate vs. interest-based display, measured across 1,200+ Context Hints campaigns

63%

Lower cost per qualified lead when ads are placed inside an active AI conversation

2.8×

More pipeline per dollar versus retargeting after a 90-day cookie window

91%

Of users who click a context-matched ad complete the next intended action

ChatGPT Ads

Run ads inside the conversation buyers are already having.

Eight hundred million people now use ChatGPT every week to research, compare, decide and act. They no longer scroll through ten blue links — they ask one question and expect one answer. That single shift collapses the entire marketing funnel into the length of a prompt. Context Hints meets your buyer inside that prompt with placements that read as helpful, convert like search, and scale like social.

Native conversational placements

Your offer surfaces as a recommended option inside the AI's reply — disclosed, ranked by relevance, never pretending to be the model's own opinion. Click-through rates measured in our beta averaged 9.6%, more than 14× the IAB display benchmark.

Intent extracted from the prompt

We parse every conversation in real time for product category, use case, company size, budget signal, regulatory constraint, urgency and competitive comparisons. Bids fire only when the buyer's stated intent matches the criteria you defined.

Conversion lift you can defend

Because the placement sits inside a stated need, the funnel collapses. Median conversion rate across Context Hints ChatGPT campaigns is 11.2% — versus 1.8% for paid social and 3.9% for branded search. We provide a deterministic, click-level attribution feed so finance never has to take your word for it.

Audiences without identifiers

Build audiences from what people say, not who they are. "Founders evaluating payroll software for <50 employees in the EU" is a Context Hints audience. No cookie. No fingerprint. No PII. The targeting lives in the language, which means it survives every privacy regulation that has been written and every one that's coming.

Brand-safe by construction

The model only triggers your ad when the prompt and the response both match your safety rules. No adjacency risk, no scraped pages, no surprise placements next to harmful content. Every impression is generated, not borrowed.

One campaign, every AI surface

A single Context Hints campaign distributes across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude.ai and our long tail of AI publisher partners. You write the offer once. We rewrite, re-rank and re-place it for each surface, then unify the reporting in one dashboard.

Field guide

Why context targeting works when interest targeting has run out of road.

To understand why context is the new interest targeting, look at how a modern purchase actually unfolds. A product manager at a Series B startup needs an analytics tool. In 2018, her path would have included a Google search, four open tabs, three vendor demos, a Capterra page, and roughly 40 retargeting impressions across LinkedIn, YouTube and the Financial Times. In 2026, that whole sequence collapses into a single conversation with ChatGPT: "What's the best product analytics platform for a B2B SaaS with around 60k MAU and an event-heavy schema?" ChatGPT responds with three options, a short comparison, and a closing recommendation. The decision is largely made before she ever visits a website.

Every interest-based ad chasing her for the next six weeks is now spending against a decision that has already been resolved. The marketer who reached her inside that original conversation, with a placement matched to the criteria she herself spelled out, was the one with a real chance. That is the entire thesis behind Context Hints: ads should be served at the moment of need expression, not at the moment of need recovery.

Five reasons context outperforms interest

Recency is total. Interest signals decay; the prompt was written in the last 800 milliseconds. There is no fresher signal of intent on the open internet.
Specificity is volunteered. Interest targeting infers what you might want from what you browsed. Context targeting reads what you wrote. Users tell the model their company size, region, budget, deadline and constraints — for free.
Funnel stage is explicit. "What is X?" is research. "How do I integrate X with Y?" is evaluation. "Why is X better than Y for fintechs in Europe?" is bottom of funnel. Context Hints scores stage automatically and matches bid logic to it.
The ad completes the answer. A great context ad is the recommendation the user came in to receive. Engagement is high because the ad is not an interruption — it is the destination.
Privacy holds up in court. Context is content, not identity. Context Hints never sees who the user is — only what they're asking. This passes GDPR, the DMA, the EU AI Act, CPRA, India's DPDP and every regulatory regime currently drafting.

Three places where interest targeting is now actively losing money

Programmatic display. Open-web display has lost roughly a third of its addressable identifiers since Safari's ITP rollout, and the rest is dissolving with Chrome's Privacy Sandbox. The graphs that powered third-party audience segments were never re-validated against the new identity reality. Advertisers are buying ghosts.

Social interest categories. The "people interested in Salesforce" audience on a major social network includes everyone who has ever liked a Salesforce employee's post, attended a non-tech event sponsored by Salesforce, or worked at a company with Salesforce in its careers page. The signal-to-noise ratio is now well under 1:50 by independent measurement.

Long-window retargeting. A 90-day retargeting cookie now misses the buyer entirely if she made her decision inside a 12-minute ChatGPT conversation she had once and never returned to. The journey she actually completed never produced a single retargetable event.

What changes when you switch to context

Customers who shift even 20% of legacy interest budget into Context Hints context placements see compound effects across the funnel. Lead volume holds while CPL drops, because impressions now happen at higher intent. Sales cycles shorten by 18–24%, because buyers arrive having already self-qualified inside the conversation. Brand search lift appears within 14 days, because every AI mention is also discovered downstream by humans typing your name into a search box. And the legal team stops sending you nervous emails.

This is what we mean when we say context is the new interest targeting. Not "an alternative." Not "a complementary channel." The replacement. The next plumbing layer of demand generation. Context Hints is the platform that lets you operate it.

Conversion

Higher conversion. More targeted audiences. Less wasted spend.

Conversion lift on ChatGPT placements isn't a small uplift on a known channel — it is a different physics. When the ad lives inside the decision instead of beside it, every metric that finance cares about moves.

11.2% median conversion rate

Across 1,200+ campaigns, Context Hints placements convert at 11.2% — versus 1.8% for paid social and 3.9% for branded search. The reason is structural: the ad sits inside an articulated need, not next to a piece of content the user is trying to read.

Audiences defined by intent

Forget building a lookalike from a 5,000-person seed list. With Context Hints you describe the buyer in plain English — "compliance leads at US healthcare companies asking about HIPAA-ready document tools" — and the audience materialises at impression time.

CPL down 63%, on average

When you only pay for impressions that already match a documented buyer signal, the cost-per-lead math collapses. Context Hints customers report a median 63% reduction in CPL versus the legacy mix they replaced.

Pipeline that closes faster

Buyers who arrive through an AI conversation have already auto-qualified on the basics. Context Hints customers see sales cycles shorten by 18–24%, and a higher proportion of opportunities close-won within the same quarter they were created.

How Context Hints works

From offer to outcome in four steps.

No new creative team. No pixel install on every AI surface. No three-month integration. Context Hints handles the surfaces, the bidding, the formatting and the reporting — you handle the offer.

Describe your buyer

Tell Context Hints in a paragraph who you want to reach, what they're trying to do, and the proof you have to offer them.

We compile your audience

Context Hints turns the paragraph into a real-time intent classifier that runs across every supported AI surface.

Ads fire in-conversation

When a buyer's prompt matches, your offer appears inside the AI's answer — disclosed, ranked and creative-matched.

Outcomes report back

Every click, signup, demo and closed deal flows back into your dashboard, your CRM and your warehouse.

"We moved 30% of our paid social budget into Context Hints's ChatGPT inventory and qualified pipeline went up while CAC went down. Six months in, it's the single best line item in the marketing stack."

Amelia Voss — VP Growth, Quanta Cloud

Meet the founder

Built by a media buyer who has spent twelve years inside the funnel.

Context Hints is not an experiment by AI researchers wondering how ads might one day work. It is a platform built by someone who has run nine-figure budgets across every major channel and watched the interest-graph break in real time.

Available for advisory Tarun, Founder of Context Hints

Tarun

Founder & CEO · Context Hints

Twelve years of media buying. One thesis about where it's all going.

Tarun has spent more than a decade buying media at the level where mistakes cost six figures and instincts have to be defensible. He started inside the world's largest holding companies — GroupM, WPP, and Ogilvy & Mather — running performance and brand campaigns for some of the biggest advertisers in the world. By the time he left agency life, he had built and broken every kind of audience model the industry sells.

He was then recruited by Neil Patel to help scale his marketing agency, where Tarun became one of the leaders behind a business that now runs at roughly $6.5M ARR. During his tenure he was directly responsible for adding more than $3.5M to the bottom line, while also running paid campaigns for Ubersuggest — one of the largest SEO tools on the planet — across acquisition, retention, and product-led growth motions.

Along the way he has personally owned media strategy and execution for brands including Nestlé, Sage, Qualcomm, Aetna, Weight Watchers, Chubb, and Novotel, alongside a long roster of venture-backed SMB startups that needed to find product-market fit inside a paid channel before their runway ran out. He was also a vetted operator at GrowthCollective.com, later acquired by Toptal — the global network that admits roughly the top 1% of freelance talent in the world.

Today he advises and consults for Fortune 500s and high-growth startups as a fractional CMO, getting genuinely operative on what matters: media buying, team setup, attribution architecture, and the unglamorous wiring that turns a marketing department into a revenue department. Context Hints is the product of everything he learned watching cookies die, attribution fracture, and buyers migrate into AI conversations faster than the industry was willing to admit.

12+ yrs

Performance & brand media buying

$3.5M+

Added to a single agency's bottom line

$6.5M

ARR scale operated alongside Neil Patel

Brands & networks Tarun has operated inside

GroupM WPP Ogilvy & Mather Neil Patel Digital Ubersuggest Nestlé Sage Qualcomm Aetna Weight Watchers Chubb Novotel Growth Collective → Toptal

"I have spent twelve years buying audiences. The honest truth is that the audience is no longer a list of people — it is a sentence someone just typed into ChatGPT. Context Hints is the platform I wish I'd had on day one."

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