Guides · Ads & shopping in AI
ChatGPT ads: how advertising on ChatGPT works.
In short: yes, ChatGPT has ads. OpenAI started testing them in the U.S. on February 9, 2026, and by September 23, 2026 they ran in over 60 countries. Businesses buy them in the self-serve Ads Manager at ads.openai.com from a $25 daily budget, priced in an auction per 1,000 impressions or per click. Ads appear labeled below the answer, only for Free and Go users 18 and over. You can’t buy a place in the answer itself: according to OpenAI, ads don’t influence ChatGPT’s responses.
By the Claire teamLast checked 11 min read
At a glance
As of October 8, 2026
Ads have run in the U.S. since February 9, 2026, and in over 60 countries as of September 23, 2026.
Source: OpenAI: ChatGPT Ads expands to Southeast Asia and Taiwan, Sep 23, 2026Only Free and Go users 18+ see ads. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts are ad-free.
Source: OpenAI Help: Ads in ChatGPT (updated Sep 28, 2026)Minimum daily budget is $25. OpenAI recommends starting CPC campaigns with a $3–$5 maximum bid.
Source: OpenAI Help: Create campaigns (Oct 7, 2026)OpenAI says ads don’t influence answers, and product results in ChatGPT are not ads.
Source: OpenAI Help: Shopping with ChatGPT search (Oct 3, 2026)Contents
As of October 2026
Does ChatGPT have ads? Yes, since February 2026, now in 60+ countries.
OpenAI announced ads in January 2026 and began testing them in the U.S. in February. Self-serve buying followed in May, Europe in late August, and on September 23, 2026 OpenAI listed more than 60 countries. OpenAI still calls the program a beta.
Timeline
The program changed a lot in eight months, so every step is dated here.
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| Jan 16, 2026 | OpenAI announces ad tests in the U.S. for the Free and Go tiers. |
| Feb 9, 2026 | Testing starts in the U.S. for logged-in adults on Free and Go. |
| Mar 26, 2026 | Pilots announced for Canada, Australia and New Zealand. |
| May 5, 2026 | Self-serve Ads Manager (beta), CPC buying next to CPM, agency and technology partners. |
| Aug 11, 2026 | Launch in the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea. |
| Aug 31, 2026 | Self-serve across 31 European markets; over 40 countries; $1 billion annualized revenue run rate. |
| Sep 16, 2026 | Shopify and HubSpot partnerships; Sponsored Agents tested in the U.S. |
| Sep 23, 2026 | Over 60 countries. |
Sources:OpenAI: Our approach to advertising, Jan 16, 2026OpenAI: Testing ads in ChatGPT, Feb 9, 2026 (updated Aug 11, 2026)OpenAI: New ways to buy ChatGPT ads, May 5, 2026OpenAI: ChatGPT Ads expands across Europe, Aug 18, 2026OpenAI: A milestone in expanding access to AI, Aug 31, 2026OpenAI: Reimagining advertising with AI, Sep 16, 2026OpenAI: ChatGPT Ads expands to Southeast Asia and Taiwan, Sep 23, 2026
Who sees ads, and why you might be seeing them
Ads appear only on the Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts don’t get ads, and neither do accounts identified as under 18. Ads now also show in logged-out ChatGPT, limited to ads suitable for all audiences. There are no ads in the ChatGPT Atlas browser or in temporary chats.
Which ad you see depends on your current conversation, the advertiser’s landing page, copy and context hints, and, if ad personalization is on, select signals from your other chats and memory. You can turn personalization off in Settings → Ad Controls. Free users can pick an ad-free option with fewer messages per day; Go has no ad-free option.
Formats
What ChatGPT ads look like: labeled, below the answer.
Ads appear below the end of a response, labeled as sponsored and visually separated from it. One or more ad units can follow a response, from one advertiser or several.
The standard ad
Each ad has the advertiser name, logo, a title, copy, a landing page and an image. OpenAI gives these limits:
Title
- Recommended
- 16–24 characters
- Maximum
- 50 characters
Copy
- Recommended
- 32–48 characters
- Maximum
- 100 characters
Image
- Recommended
- PNG or JPG, square
- Maximum
- 1,200 × 1,200 px
Sources:OpenAI Help: Ads in ChatGPT, The Basics (Sep 24, 2026)OpenAI Help: Launch campaigns (Oct 7, 2026)
Product ads from your catalog
Retailers can build campaigns from a product feed. These ads show product image, title, star rating, price, sale price and brand, and OpenAI says they have been among the strongest-performing ads so far.
Note the separation: during the beta, products from your ads feed appear only in ads, not in organic ChatGPT conversations.
Sources:OpenAI Help: Campaigns from product feeds (Sep 28, 2026)OpenAI Ads docs: Product feeds
What’s still in testing
An optional feature adapts your existing headlines and descriptions to the conversation and translates them into the user’s language. Sponsored Agents, where a click opens a labeled conversation with the brand’s own agent, are a closed U.S. alpha with selected advertisers; OpenAI isn’t taking requests.
Sources:OpenAI: Reimagining advertising with AI, Sep 16, 2026OpenAI Help: Sponsored Agents (Sep 17, 2026)
How to
How to advertise on ChatGPT: Ads Manager, partners or sales.
There are three ways in: the self-serve Ads Manager at ads.openai.com, an agency or technology partner, or OpenAI’s sales team for larger advertisers. For Ads Manager, what counts is where the legal entity that pays is based; the U.S. is on the list, along with 60+ other countries.
Your first campaign in five steps
This is how OpenAI describes the Ads Manager flow.
- Create an account at ads.openai.com with a work email.
- Set up a billing profile and payment method, then complete account verification.
- Create a campaign: choose the objective (views, clicks or conversions), daily budget and countries, and optionally platforms such as iOS, Android or desktop.
- Create an ad group with context hints. They are not exact-match keywords, they tell the system which conversations fit, and they don’t guarantee delivery.
- Upload your ads. OpenAI reviews title, copy, image and landing page before they run.
Sources:OpenAI Help: Quickstart (Oct 7, 2026)OpenAI Help: Create campaigns (Oct 7, 2026)OpenAI Help: Ad groups (Sep 17, 2026)OpenAI: Ad policies (updated Sep 10, 2026)
Your landing page must be reachable by OpenAI’s crawlers
Landing pages must not block OAI-AdsBot or OAI-SearchBot, or the ad is rejected. OAI-AdsBot only visits pages submitted as ads, checks them against the policies and uses their content to decide when the ad is relevant. OpenAI says this data isn’t used to train its models.
If your firewall or CDN blocks OpenAI’s bots, you risk rejected ads and you’re also missing from ChatGPT search.
Sources:OpenAI Help: Create ads (Oct 6, 2026)OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI crawlers
Free AI crawler checkerPartners, Shopify and the Advertiser API
OpenAI names Dentsu, Omnicom, Publicis and WPP as agency partners and Adobe, Criteo, Kargo, Pacvue and StackAdapt as technology partners, more than 50 in total. Shopify, OpenAI’s first ecommerce partner, has a ChatGPT Ads app for U.S. merchants; HubSpot is the first CRM partner. Amazon Ads says select U.S. advertisers are testing ChatGPT ads in a pilot.
New self-serve accounts may at first advertise only in their home country; more countries open after verification and initial spend.
Sources:OpenAI: New ways to buy ChatGPT ads, May 5, 2026OpenAI: A milestone in expanding access to AI, Aug 31, 2026OpenAI: Reimagining advertising with AI, Sep 16, 2026OpenAI Help: ChatGPT Ads for Shopify (Sep 27, 2026)Amazon Ads, Sep 10, 2026OpenAI Help: Create campaigns (Oct 7, 2026)
Cost
How much do ChatGPT ads cost? From $25 a day; the auction decides the rest.
There is no fixed price. Ads are sold in an auction and billed per 1,000 impressions or per click. OpenAI explicitly does not publish average prices or performance benchmarks yet.
What OpenAI officially says
These figures come from OpenAI’s advertiser help center.
| Item | OpenAI’s figure |
|---|---|
| Billing | per 1,000 impressions (CPM) or per click (CPC). Even with a conversions objective you never pay per conversion. |
| Auction | relevance-weighted second-price auction |
| Minimum daily budget | $25 (EUR 15, GBP 15, CAD 25) |
| Starting CPC bid | $3–$5 recommended |
| Pacing | up to 2× the daily budget on a single day, at most 7× over seven days |
| Benchmarks | none yet, per OpenAI |
Sources:OpenAI Help: Create campaigns (Oct 7, 2026)OpenAI Help: Ads in ChatGPT, The Basics (Sep 24, 2026)OpenAI Help: Advertiser FAQ (Sep 26, 2026)
Be careful with second-hand numbers
Figures like a “$60 CPM” circulate online. In OpenAI’s developer docs that number appears only as an explicitly illustrative example. Claims of five-figure minimum commitments don’t appear in any official OpenAI source we retrieved.
The only performance examples come from OpenAI itself: an ecommerce advertiser with 3x return on ad spend over 28 days, and a technology partner reporting that more than 80% of ad-driven ChatGPT traffic came from new customers. These are vendor claims, not benchmarks.
Sources:OpenAI Ads docs: Bidding & budgetsOpenAI: A milestone in expanding access to AI, Aug 31, 2026
Rules
ChatGPT ad policies: what’s allowed, what isn’t.
OpenAI keeps ads and answers on separate systems, advertisers never see chats, and the ad policies limit which categories may advertise. In the U.S., financial, health and legal services may be approved case by case; outside the U.S. they are generally prohibited.
Ads and answers are separate
According to OpenAI, ads run on separate systems from the chat model, and advertisers can’t shape, rank or alter responses. An ad is not an endorsement by OpenAI. Advertisers get no chats, history, memories or personal details, only aggregated numbers. If you message an advertiser directly, they see only those messages.
Where ads don’t appear
Ads aren’t eligible to appear near sensitive or regulated topics, including personal health, mental health and politics.
Who may advertise
The initial focus is consumer categories: lifestyle and household goods, local services, travel and experiences, and digital products or education. Political ads, alcohol, tobacco, gambling and dating are among the disallowed categories.
Financial services, healthcare and legal services may be approved for U.S. advertisers on a case-by-case basis (legal services since August 2026). Outside the U.S. they are generally prohibited. OpenAI also reserves the right to decline ads that conflict with its business interests or competitive position.
Paid vs. organic
Paid ad or organic recommendation? Two channels that don’t replace each other.
An ad sits below the answer. Inside the answer is what ChatGPT selects on its own: web results and, for products, structured product data. You can’t pay for that; you have to be found.
Ad vs. organic mention
The table sums up OpenAI’s documentation. The last row is our reading.
Where
- Ad
- below the answer, labeled sponsored
- Organic mention
- inside the answer, as a cited source or product result
Who sees it
- Ad
- Free and Go users 18+
- Organic mention
- everyone, including Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise
How you get in
- Ad
- bid and relevance in an auction
- Organic mention
- web search via OAI-SearchBot, product data, availability, price, quality
Cost
- Ad
- from $25 a day while the campaign runs
- Organic mention
- content and time, no cost per click
Guarantee
- Ad
- delivery within budget and auction
- Organic mention
- none; OpenAI guarantees no placement
When it stops
- Ad
- when the budget stops
- Organic mention
- as long as your pages are the best source
Sources:OpenAI Help: Ads in ChatGPT (updated Sep 28, 2026)OpenAI Help: Shopping with ChatGPT search (Oct 3, 2026)OpenAI Help: Searching the web with ChatGPT (Aug 21, 2026)
Blog: How to get cited in ChatGPTWhy this matters most in B2B
Anyone using ChatGPT through an employer’s Business or Enterprise account sees no ads, and neither do Plus and Pro subscribers. You reach those users in ChatGPT only through the answer itself. That’s our inference from OpenAI’s plan rules; OpenAI doesn’t publish how users split across plans.
Ads feed and organic products are separate
Products from an ads feed appear only in ads during the beta. Organic product results are selected independently by ChatGPT, are not ads and aren’t influenced by OpenAI partnerships. Merchants are ranked by availability, price, quality and whether they are the maker or primary seller.
Sources:OpenAI Help: Campaigns from product feeds (Sep 28, 2026)OpenAI Help: Shopping with ChatGPT search (Oct 3, 2026)
Guide: ChatGPT shoppingFor stores and B2B
Is advertising on ChatGPT worth it? Get found first, then advertise deliberately.
There’s no official answer yet: OpenAI says it has no benchmarks across advertisers or industries. Our recommendation, based on the rules above: measure whether AI assistants already mention you, test ads small if your category is allowed, and build organic visibility in parallel, because it reaches every user and doesn’t stop when the budget does.
Ecommerce
Product ads from a feed are the natural format, and Shopify merchants in the U.S. can use the ChatGPT Ads app. For organic product results, Shopify stores are already connected through Shopify Catalog, and other merchants can apply for a direct product feed. Add buying guides that answer shoppers’ questions so ChatGPT finds your store in web search too.
Sources:OpenAI Help: ChatGPT Ads for Shopify (Sep 27, 2026)OpenAI Help: Campaigns from product feeds (Sep 28, 2026)OpenAI Help: Shopping with ChatGPT search (Oct 3, 2026)
B2B and services
Software, digital products and local services fit the allowed categories. Financial, health and legal services need case-by-case approval in the U.S. And Business and Enterprise users see no ads, so for many B2B companies the organic mention is the more important channel today.
Sources:OpenAI: Ad policies (updated Sep 10, 2026)OpenAI Help: Ads in ChatGPT (updated Sep 28, 2026)
Five steps before you spend
This order protects your budget.
- Measure whether and where AI assistants mention you for your customers’ buying questions today.
- Check that OAI-SearchBot and OAI-AdsBot can reach your pages.
- Check that your category is allowed in the ad policies.
- Test small: minimum budget, one ad group with clear context hints, a matching landing page, measurement via OpenAI’s pixel or Conversions API.
- In parallel, publish pages that answer your customers’ buying questions better than anyone else.
Source:OpenAI: New ways to buy ChatGPT ads, May 5, 2026
Check your AI visibility for freeQuestions
Good to know.
Can I advertise on ChatGPT?
Yes. Businesses in the U.S. and 60+ other countries can buy ads in the self-serve Ads Manager at ads.openai.com, or through agency and technology partners. OpenAI reviews every ad and its landing page before it runs.
How much does it cost to advertise on ChatGPT?
The minimum daily budget is $25. Ads are billed per 1,000 impressions or per click and sold in a relevance-weighted auction. OpenAI recommends starting CPC campaigns with a $3–$5 maximum bid and doesn’t publish average prices.
Can I pay ChatGPT to recommend my business?
No. You can only pay for a labeled ad below the answer. According to OpenAI, ads don’t influence responses, and product results aren’t ads. You get into the answer only if ChatGPT finds your pages or product data as a relevant source.
Why am I seeing ads on ChatGPT?
Ads show on the Free and Go plans. Which ad you see depends on your current conversation and, if ad personalization is on, select signals from your other chats and memory. You can turn personalization off under Settings → Ad Controls, choose the ad-free Free option with fewer messages, or upgrade to Plus or Pro.
Do all ChatGPT users see ads?
No. Only Free and Go users see ads. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts don’t, and neither do users under 18.
Is advertising on ChatGPT worth it?
There’s no independent evidence yet. OpenAI says it has no performance benchmarks across advertisers or industries. Its own examples, such as one ecommerce advertiser’s 3x return on ad spend over 28 days, are vendor claims. Test with a small budget and clean measurement.
Which businesses can’t advertise on ChatGPT?
Political ads, alcohol, tobacco, gambling and dating are among the disallowed categories. Financial, health and legal services need case-by-case approval in the U.S. and are generally prohibited elsewhere.
Do advertisers see my ChatGPT conversations?
No. According to OpenAI, advertisers get no chats, history, memories or personal details, only aggregated numbers like views and clicks. If you message an advertiser directly, they see only those messages.
About this guide
Author, method and sources
Written by the Claire team at wordsmattr GmbH in Vienna. Claire is our own product, your AI colleague for visibility in ChatGPT and Google: she finds where you’re missing, closes the gaps and shows you the results. First published on , last checked against the sources on . We review this guide every quarter and whenever a provider changes its documentation.
How we researched
- Search demand: Google Ads via DataForSEO, United States, monthly average, retrieved Oct 8, 2026. “chatgpt ads” 14,800 (1,900 in September 2025, 22,200 in August 2026), “openai ads” 3,600, “advertise on chatgpt” 1,000, “chatgpt ads manager” 1,000.
- Search results: Google top 10 with “People also ask” for “chatgpt ads”, “openai ads”, “advertise on chatgpt” and “how to advertise on chatgpt” (U.S.), retrieved Oct 8, 2026. The results are mostly news, agency blogs and a Reddit thread from r/shopify.
- Facts: only OpenAI’s own pages (openai.com, help.openai.com, developers.openai.com, ads.openai.com) plus Amazon Ads’ announcement, all retrieved Oct 8, 2026. Claims found only in news or agency posts were left out.
- Help center dates: OpenAI shows only “X days ago”; the exact date comes from the page’s timestamp.
Sources, all retrieved on October 8, 2026
- OpenAI Help: Ads in ChatGPT (updated Sep 28, 2026)
- OpenAI Help: Ads in ChatGPT, The Basics (Sep 24, 2026)
- OpenAI Help: Create campaigns (Oct 7, 2026)
- OpenAI Help: Ads Manager availability (Sep 25, 2026)
- OpenAI Help: Launch campaigns (Oct 7, 2026)
- OpenAI Help: Quickstart (Oct 7, 2026)
- OpenAI Help: Campaigns from product feeds (Sep 28, 2026)
- OpenAI Help: Advertiser FAQ (Sep 26, 2026)
- OpenAI Help: Create ads (Oct 6, 2026)
- OpenAI Help: Ad groups (Sep 17, 2026)
- OpenAI Help: Shopping with ChatGPT search (Oct 3, 2026)
- OpenAI Help: Searching the web with ChatGPT (Aug 21, 2026)
- OpenAI Help: Sponsored Agents (Sep 17, 2026)
- OpenAI Help: ChatGPT Ads for Shopify (Sep 27, 2026)
- OpenAI: Our approach to advertising, Jan 16, 2026
- OpenAI: Testing ads in ChatGPT, Feb 9, 2026 (updated Aug 11, 2026)
- OpenAI: New ways to buy ChatGPT ads, May 5, 2026
- OpenAI: ChatGPT Ads expands across Europe, Aug 18, 2026
- OpenAI: A milestone in expanding access to AI, Aug 31, 2026
- OpenAI: Reimagining advertising with AI, Sep 16, 2026
- OpenAI: ChatGPT Ads expands to Southeast Asia and Taiwan, Sep 23, 2026
- OpenAI: Ad policies (updated Sep 10, 2026)
- OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI crawlers
- OpenAI Ads docs: Product feeds
- OpenAI Ads docs: Bidding & budgets
- ads.openai.com
- Amazon Ads, Sep 10, 2026
More guides
Keep reading. Same rules: answer first, sources dated.
Before you pay for ads: are you already mentioned in AI answers?
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