OpenAI began testing ads inside ChatGPT with a United States pilot in February 2026. Six months later the platform runs in nine countries, has been announced for 31 more across Europe, and has moved from an invitation-only pilot to a self-serve Ads Manager with CPM, CPC and conversion-optimised buying. This is what it is, what it costs, who can actually buy it, and how to decide whether it belongs in your plan.
What a ChatGPT ad looks like
The unit is called a chat card, and it appears below a ChatGPT response. The card carries your business name, your favicon, a headline, a line of body copy, an image and a link to your landing page.
The limits are tight. Headlines run from 3 to 50 characters. Body copy is capped at 100 characters. OpenAI's advertiser documentation lists two creative types: the chat card, and a product ad template for merchants advertising from a catalogue rather than from a single static creative.
Two things the commentary keeps getting wrong
Ads do not change the answer. OpenAI's stated policy is that advertising does not influence the responses ChatGPT gives, that ads are clearly labelled, and that they stay separate from the assistant's output. You cannot pay your way into a recommendation. You can pay for the card that sits underneath one. Being named inside the answer itself is earned work, and it is a different discipline entirely.
Ads only reach the free tiers. ChatGPT ads are shown to people on the Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts see no ads, and neither do accounts identified as belonging to under-18s. For consumer categories that is a large audience. For business software sold to people whose employer pays for Enterprise seats, it is a real structural problem, and it is the single most useful question to ask before funding a test.
How targeting works
This is not keyword buying and it is not audience buying in the Meta sense.
At ad group level you write context hints: plain descriptions of the conversations, topics and situations where your product is genuinely relevant. OpenAI matches against the context and intent of the live conversation. Hints guide matching. They are not exact-match keywords and they do not guarantee delivery.
Geographic targeting is country level in every market. Inside the United States you can also target by state, DMA and postal code. OpenAI notes that finer location targeting varies by country. You can restrict delivery to the iOS app, the Android app or the web.
Custom audiences are supported from your own first-party email or phone lists, subject to a minimum matched size. They are not available for campaigns targeting the European Economic Area or Switzerland, where personalised ads have not launched. There are no demographic controls, no lookalikes and no site retargeting.
What it costs
Media is bought one of three ways. A Reach objective bills per thousand impressions. A Clicks objective bills per valid click. A conversion-optimised campaign still bills per click, but optimises delivery toward one tracked conversion event you choose at creation and cannot change afterwards.
OpenAI currently recommends opening at 3 to 5 US dollars per click. Maximum bids are set at ad group level, and the auction is a relevance-weighted second price, so the bid is one input among several. There is no published performance benchmark across advertisers, industries or campaign types. OpenAI says so directly, which is more honest than most of the third-party numbers circulating.
Billing is postpay. Spend accrues, and your card is charged when the account hits a payment threshold that is assigned to you and that neither you nor support can change. Any outstanding balance is charged at month end regardless. Set a campaign or daily budget at creation, because the payment threshold is not a spend cap.
Who can open an advertiser account
This is the question that decides everything else, and it is worth checking before any planning work starts.
At the time of writing, in August 2026, Ads Manager is available to businesses registered in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Thirty-one European markets, the European Economic Area plus Switzerland, have been announced and are opening through the OpenAI ads team, agency partners and technology partners first, with self-serve to follow. This list has moved every few months since launch, so treat it as a snapshot rather than a settled position.
Eligibility follows the country your business is registered in, not the country you want to sell into. An account is verified against one legal entity, and the business country, currency and billing details are fixed at account creation. Your payment method has to match that entity and country.
If your business is registered somewhere else, the paid platform is closed to you for now, and no agency can open it on your behalf. Register your interest with OpenAI, use a group entity in an eligible country if you have one, and read the section below.
Measurement
Wire measurement before you buy anything. There are three routes and they are not exclusive.
The OpenAI measurement pixel is a browser SDK you install in the head of your site and fire on conversion events. The Conversions API sends the same events server side and is the more reliable of the two. Running both with a shared event ID lets the platform deduplicate. Third-party measurement partner integrations exist, including for mobile. UTM parameters on your landing page URLs persist through ad clicks, so your existing analytics can see the traffic even before anything else is set up.
Reporting covers impressions, clicks, spend, click-through rate, average CPC, average CPM and conversions. Attribution is click-through. One-day view-through conversions are reported separately and do not feed bidding or cost per acquisition.
The failure that catches most advertisers
Ads get rejected or fail to serve for a reason that has nothing to do with the creative. OpenAI crawls your landing page to review it against policy, and to understand when the ad is relevant. If that crawl is blocked, the ad does not run.
You must allow OAI-AdsBot. OpenAI also recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot. Blocking happens at four layers and people usually only check the first: robots rules, then firewall and bot mitigation at the CDN, then application-level checks such as CAPTCHAs and JavaScript challenges, then rate limiting on bulk uploads. Audit all four before you submit.
The other route: getting named in the answer
Paid placement and organic citation are separate mechanisms. If what you actually want is for ChatGPT to name your business when somebody asks it for a shortlist, no amount of media spend does that. The work is closer to technical SEO than to media buying: crawler access, page structure an assistant can quote cleanly, an entity and citation footprint across the sources these models read, machine-readable product and pricing data, and tracking of where you appear at the prompt level.
It carries no country restriction, which matters if your market has not opened yet. It also takes months rather than days, which is an argument for starting it now rather than waiting for an advertiser account.
Should you run it
Treat it as a measured test with real attribution, not as a core channel and not as something to ignore. Three questions decide it. Is your business registered in an eligible country. Do your buyers sit on the free tiers. Can you wire conversion measurement before the first impression. If all three are yes, size a budget that produces a readable signal and read the result honestly.
We plan, build, run and measure ChatGPT campaigns, and we run the earned visibility work that gets brands named in the answers. See ChatGPT Ads for how that works, or send a brief and we will come back with a plan and a name on it.