About
This isn't an about page. It's a filter.
If you're here to check if I have an MBA, a Forbes feature, or a team of forty — close the tab. I don't. And the brands winning ChatGPT Ads right now don't care.
Sacha Lefebvre.
Founder of Paidaisearch. Based in Austin. I operate in English, Spanish, and French. Before this I built and sold five businesses over a decade in Madrid.
I do one thing now: run ChatGPT Ads for Shopify brands as a performance partner. Paid on what the ads generate. The foundation work the ads need to perform comes bundled.
That's it. No retainers for "growth." No fractional CMO games. No twelve-month SEO contracts.
I've done "no playbook exists" five times.
In 2013 I sold my car for $1,000 to start my first business. I contacted a manufacturer in the Netherlands, brought the first beer bike to the city, and built the city's top activity for bachelor parties. Four bikes. No license existed. The police stopped us every week. I learned vehicle traffic regulations until I could argue the law better than they could.
Then local government changed the legal framework. Cycles with more than five passengers — banned. My business was the only one affected. Meetings with regulators went nowhere.
So I flew to China, had a manufacturer build custom five-seater cycles, and kept running. Two years later, they banned those too.
That's the pattern. The rules change. You adapt or you're done.
After that: tuk-tuks — the first electric tourist tuk-tuks. No regulation. No precedent. Built it anyway. Then pedicabs. Then axe throwing under the Urban Safari brand.
ChatGPT Ads is the same game. OpenAI is rewriting the framework for how products get discovered and bought. Most agencies will copy-paste the Google Ads playbook into ChatGPT and bid harder. The operators who learn the new mechanic — engineering their Contextual Relevance Score (CRS), the number that decides what every dollar of ChatGPT Ad spend is worth — pay below category-average CPC. Everyone else pays the tax.
Urban Safari. Built it, grew it, sold it.
Urban Safari was my fifth business. Axe throwing and guided tours under one brand. The kind of thing a tourist decides on at 9pm in their hotel room after asking the internet "what to do."
4.9 stars on Google Maps across 3,600+ reviews. Don't take my word for it — read them.
I ran every part of the marketing: Meta Ads, Google Ads, SEO, email flows, WhatsApp automations, influencer collabs, TikTok content that hit 1M+ views. No agency. Just me and the work.
I exited in October 2023. The brand still runs today under Experiencity.
We didn't get there by outbidding the Prado on Google Ads. We got there because when someone researched what to do in Madrid, we showed up as the answer.
Same game now, different surface. The auction is inside ChatGPT, the ad shows up at the bottom of the answer, and the price you pay per click depends on what the model can extract from your store. Engineered foundation, below category-average CPC. Broken foundation, the tax.
Why this site exists. The real reason.
ChatGPT Ads went self-serve to all U.S. advertisers on May 5, 2026. Minimum spend removed. CPC bidding. Conversions API and JS Pixel shipped the same day. The platform is open.
The Pro Audit is the spear tip — $500 to know where your store sits, why, and what it'll cost on CPC if you launch ads on top of a broken foundation. The newsletter is the warming list for operators who aren't ready to audit yet.
I'd rather you know the deal upfront than dress it up as "free value."
What I believe.
- Google Ads is becoming a tax on brands too slow to adapt.
- The decision happens inside the AI. The click is just the receipt.
- If your product page reads like a brochure, the model can't recommend it. You pay the tax.
- Most "AI SEO" is the same SEO consultants from 2014 wearing a new t-shirt.
- The brands that win the next five years aren't the ones with the biggest budget. They're the ones bidding from an engineered foundation.
Who I work with. Who I don't.
Built for
- Shopify, doing $100k+/month in revenue
- Founder-operated, no committee buying
- Already running paid acquisition seriously — Meta, Google, or both
- Customers in US, Australia, New Zealand, or Canada
- Operators who move when they see the signal
Not for
- Anyone not on Shopify
- Anyone serving primarily EU, LATAM, or APAC outside Australia/New Zealand
- Anyone in OpenAI-prohibited verticals — dating, certain health categories, financial services, politics
- Anyone shopping five agencies for the cheapest rate or longest lock-in
The moment that matters.
Picture next quarter. Your competitor's ChatGPT Ad runs at $2.40 CPC because their store has been earning the model's trust for six months. Yours runs at $4.10 because the model can't make sense of the PDP. Same query. Same intent. Different foundation.
That's the moment. Not the rollout. The auction.
When Gemini opens ad inventory, you're already trusted by the model.
By then, the foundation is already done — or it isn't.
Apply for the audit.
Every engagement starts here. The audit tells you where your store sits, why it's that number, and what it costs on CPC if you launch ads on top of a broken foundation.
Free score — no card required · Results via email in 48h · Snapshot page + video walkthrough