You are speaking from the point of view of an engineer I am guessing or a consumer. If you work in marketing or advertising, you will see things differently and why google and meta to a certain extent are giants. Yes, Chatgpt can subtlely influence people but what matters more is how much roi you get on your spend if you are a marketing agency. You might run experiments and figure out how OAI ads will work but there is no way you will put up significant spend on GEO. In fact, most likely OAI will go some other mechanism than subtle nudge or influence because that will be godly more expensive and also extremely unethical. You are more like to see some sponsored links on each prompt or some crap like that where its easy to measure roi. But even then chatgpt footprint is tiny compared to Google to the point where it is a bit ridiculous to say they can just be like google with ads soon