Short answer: not from a UAE or Saudi registered entity, not yet. ChatGPT advertiser accounts are gated on the country your business is registered in, and neither market is on the list. That is worth knowing before anyone builds a plan around it, and it is worth knowing what the real alternatives are, because two of them are better than waiting.
Where advertiser accounts are open
As of August 2026, OpenAI's Ads Manager is available to businesses registered in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The list has grown every few months since launch, so check the current position before you act on it.
Thirty-one European markets, the European Economic Area plus Switzerland, have been announced. Those are opening through the OpenAI ads team, agency partners and technology partners first, with self-serve access following.
The United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Egypt and Jordan appear on neither list. OpenAI publishes advertiser availability by country, and none of them are on it.
Why an agency cannot open it for you
This is the part worth being blunt about, because it is already being sold.
A ChatGPT advertiser account is verified against one legal entity: registered name, registration number and address. The business country, the currency and the billing details are set when the account is created and are not self-serve editable afterwards. The payment method has to match the entity and its country of registration.
There is no manager account structure that lets a third party lend you its eligibility. An eligible business opens its own account and then grants agency access to it, which is the normal way agency access works on any ad platform. What does not exist is an arrangement where an agency in London or New York runs ads for a business that cannot itself hold an account. If someone offers you that, ask them which entity the account is registered to and whose payment method is on it. The answer is the problem.
What actually works
Use a group entity you already have. If your group has a UK, US or European company, that entity can hold the advertiser account. Plenty of businesses already have one. This is the fastest legitimate route and it is worth checking before assuming the door is closed.
Register your interest. OpenAI runs an interest form for businesses outside the current countries, which asks where your business is headquartered and which countries you want to advertise in. Being in the queue costs nothing.
Start the earned work now. This is the recommendation for most businesses in these markets, and it is not a consolation prize.
The part nobody is gated out of
Paid ads in ChatGPT do not influence what ChatGPT says. OpenAI's stated position is that advertising does not influence the answers ChatGPT gives, and that ads are clearly labelled and kept separate from them.
So when a buyer asks ChatGPT to shortlist suppliers, contractors, clinics, schools or software, the businesses it names are not there because they paid. They are there because of what the model can read about them. That mechanism has no country restriction. A company in Dubai or Riyadh can compete for it on exactly the same terms as one in London.
The work is closer to technical SEO than to media buying:
- Crawler access audited across all four layers that block it: robots rules, firewall and CDN bot mitigation, application-level challenges, and rate limiting.
- Pages restructured so an assistant can quote them cleanly and attribute them correctly.
- An entity and citation footprint built across the sources these models actually read.
- Product, pricing and availability data published in machine-readable form.
- Prompt-level tracking of where you appear, and where competitors appear instead.
It compounds and it takes months. Which is the argument for starting it while the paid platform is still closed, rather than after it opens and everyone starts at once.
What to do this quarter
Check whether your group holds an entity in an eligible country. Register interest with OpenAI for your market. Audit whether OAI-AdsBot and OAI-SearchBot can reach your site at all, because a surprising number of well-built sites block them at the firewall without anyone knowing. Then start the earned visibility work.
Meanwhile the channels that do reach buyers in these markets are unchanged and bookable today: out-of-home, radio, television and press in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and every other market we cover, with published rates.
See ChatGPT Ads and AI visibility for how we run both sides, or send a brief and we will come back with a plan for the route that is open to you.