Bill Simmons Killed The Ringer's ChatGPT Deal After Fan Backlash

Bill Simmons, founder and CEO of the Spotify-owned podcast network The Ringer, canceled a ChatGPT sponsorship after listeners rejected AI-driven segments baked into his shows, according to a November 12 Bloomberg report by Ashley Carman. Bloomberg did not report the deal's value or its official end date, but the feed tells its own story: ChatGPT ad copy last ran in the notes of a "Bill Simmons Podcast" episode on August 25, and it hasn't appeared in the 35 episodes published since, per a Net Influencer review of the show's RSS feed.

Simmons confirmed the kill himself. In a statement to Bloomberg, he said The Ringer had tried to "integrate AI research for baked-in content segments for a couple of our shows the way some of our competitors were doing (and also leagues like the NFL were doing)" starting last spring. "I'm always going to try to be early instead of late on something," Simmons said. "This time we learned almost immediately that those segments weren't a fit for us... our audience just didn't like them."

What did the AI segments actually sound like?

The sponsored segments ran mainly on "The Bill Simmons Podcast" and "The Ringer Fantasy Football Show," Awful Announcing reported on August 18. On the August 17 episode covering Russell Westbrook's retirement, a segment on the guard's defining game opened as "brought to you by ChatGPT, the Bill Simmons Podcast AI sponsor." ChatGPT picked an April 2017 Thunder game against the Denver Nuggets. On the fantasy show, hosts used it to pull players' average draft positions and other statistics.

The backlash was immediate and measurable. The top five Spotify comments on the Westbrook episode were all teasing or criticizing the segment, according to the same report. The top post on the r/billsimmons subreddit that day carried the title: "The ChatGPT of it all kind of makes me want to stop listening."

Internal dissent went public too. Carman noted in her scoop on X that Ringer colleagues Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins had previously spoken out against the promotions in clips that went viral.

Why this matters beyond The Ringer

The failed deal sits inside a much bigger spending wave. OpenAI spent an estimated $11.2 million on podcast ads over the past three months, according to Bloomberg, and OpenAI and Anthropic together spent more than $13 million, per Podscribe data cited by Bloomberg. OpenAI also bought the tech talk show "TBPN" earlier this year.

Listener research flags the risk that comes with that money. In Edison Research's "The Podcast Consumer 2026" report, 62% of weekly podcast consumers said AI poses at least some threat to podcast credibility. Heather Osgood, whose True Native Media brokers host-read campaigns, told Net Influencer in June that vetting each host is what gives host-read ads their effectiveness — the exact mechanism an AI-generated content segment bypasses.

What does this change for podcast publishers and advertisers?

For publishers, it's a concrete data point that AI-branded editorial segments carry real audience cost, even on a flagship show with a devoted fanbase. For AI advertisers, it suggests spend may shift from integrated content plays back toward standard host-read ads, where the host's credibility does the heavy lifting.

Simmons hasn't said whether The Ringer will take ads from other AI companies, or whether OpenAI ads will continue as conventional ad reads. Until he does, the August 25 cutoff stands as the industry's clearest example of a sponsorship reversed purely by listener pressure.