What ChatGPT Ads are and where they appear
ChatGPT Ads are paid placements that OpenAI shows inside ChatGPT conversations. OpenAI began testing them in the US on 9 February 2026, ran a pilot with a small group of advertisers through April, and opened a beta self-serve Ads Manager on 5 May 2026. On 31 August 2026 self-serve access reached 31 European markets, and the availability list has kept growing since.
The ad appears below the end of a ChatGPT response, labelled as sponsored and visually separated from the answer. Each ad shows the advertiser name, a favicon (your logo), a title, a short description, an image and a landing page link. A user may see one or more ad units under a response when there is a relevant match. Retail advertisers can also run product ads built from a product feed, with images, titles, star ratings and prices.
Who sees them matters for planning. Ads appear for users on the Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts get none, and neither do accounts OpenAI identifies as belonging to someone under 18. Temporary Chats show no ads. OpenAI says ads are not placed near sensitive or regulated topics, including personal health, mental health and politics, and political advertising is not allowed.
Two principles matter to advertisers. Ads do not influence ChatGPT's answers: they run on separate systems, and you cannot pay to change what ChatGPT says about you. And advertisers never see conversations, only aggregated reporting such as impressions, clicks and conversions.
Who can advertise and how to get access
There are two routes in. Larger advertisers can buy through the OpenAI Ads team, agency partners (OpenAI names Dentsu, Omnicom, Publicis and WPP) or technology partners such as Adobe and Criteo. Everyone else signs up for the self-serve Ads Manager at ads.openai.com with an OpenAI login.
Self-serve eligibility depends on where the business is: the legal entity that advertises and is billed must be in a country OpenAI lists as available. On 25 September 2026 that list had 63 countries, including the US, Canada, the UK, most of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, India, Brazil, Mexico, Israel, the Gulf states and much of Southeast Asia. An account created from an unsupported country stays locked until that country opens.
Sign-up is not instant. After you enter your business name, website, logo, industry, country, currency and time zone, OpenAI runs identity verification through Persona and reviews the account in a rolling queue, including whether what you sell is eligible under its ad policies. It says it cannot expedite reviews. Country, currency and time zone cannot be changed later.
- Each advertiser needs its own account. An agency cannot create one for a client; the client creates it and invites the agency.
- Self-serve accounts pay by credit card, charged when unpaid spend reaches a threshold OpenAI assigns, and at month end.
- New self-serve accounts may be limited to their home country until verification is approved and enough spend has run there.
Formats, targeting and bidding available today
The structure is campaign, ad group, ad, the same shape as Google Ads and Meta. The campaign holds the objective, budget, dates, countries, optional platforms and optional custom audiences; the ad group holds the bid and the context hints; the ad holds the creative.
Formats. The standard ad, which the API calls a chat card, has a title of 3 to 50 characters, a body of up to 100 characters, an image and a landing URL. Product-feed campaigns build ads from your catalogue. Sponsored Agents, which let people chat with an AI representative of a business, are a limited alpha for selected advertisers, and OpenAI is not taking early-access requests.
Targeting. ChatGPT Ads is not keyword advertising. The system matches ads using the current conversation, your landing page and copy, your context hints and, where the user allows ad personalisation, signals from their wider ChatGPT use. Context hints are short descriptions of what you offer, who it helps and when it is useful, set per ad group; OpenAI is explicit that they are not exact-match keywords and guarantee nothing. The hard controls are country; states, cities and postal codes where available; platform (Android app, Android web, desktop web, iOS app, iOS web); and custom audiences from emails, phone numbers or Google Advertising IDs. Including an audience needs at least 25,000 matched users.
Bidding. Views bills per thousand impressions (CPM). Clicks bills per valid click (CPC), and OpenAI suggests starting at $3 to $5. Conversions optimises toward one standard event and bills per valid click (oCPC) or per thousand impressions (oCPM, in beta); you never pay per conversion. Eligible new ad groups default to a Maximize results strategy, or you set a manual maximum bid. The objective cannot be changed after creation, so a wrong choice means a new campaign.
Budgets. Choose a campaign-total or a daily budget. A daily budget is an average over a Sunday to Saturday week: one day can spend up to twice it, the week up to seven times it. The US minimum is $25 a day, with local equivalents such as 15 EUR and 15 GBP.
| Objective | You pay for | Optimises toward | Notes (September 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Views | Impressions (CPM) | Reach | The original pilot buying model |
| Clicks | Valid clicks (CPC) | Clicks | OpenAI suggests a $3 to $5 starting bid |
| Conversions, click billing | Valid clicks (oCPC) | One standard conversion event | Needs the Pixel or Conversions API; custom events not supported |
| Conversions, impression billing | Impressions (oCPM) | Conversions after views and clicks | In beta, access expanding |
Setting up a first campaign step by step
Once your account has passed review, these steps follow OpenAI's quickstart and campaign guides as of September 2026.
- Finish the account. Under Settings, Account info, set the name and logo exactly as they should appear in the ad; ads will not serve without them. Add the billing profile and card.
- Let OpenAI's crawler in. OpenAI checks landing pages against its policies and for relevance. Your site must allow OAI-AdsBot, and OpenAI recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot too. Check robots.txt, firewall and bot protection.
- Install measurement before launch: the OpenAI Pixel, the Conversions API or both. It is required for a Conversions objective and useful for any.
- Create the campaign: objective, a daily budget (OpenAI suggests daily over campaign-total when you are new), dates and countries.
- Create ad groups by customer need. A plumber might split emergency repairs from preventive maintenance. Write context hints that each carry one specific idea, such as "after-hours residential plumbing in [city] for urgent leaks" rather than "plumber".
- Write several distinct, benefit-led ads per ad group, as OpenAI recommends. Link each to the most relevant page, not the homepage, with your UTM parameters in the URL.
- Submit and watch the status. Every ad is reviewed before it serves; if one shows Not serving, hover the status for the reason.
Measuring results (conversions, UTMs, GA4)
Ads Manager reports impressions, clicks, spend, CTR, average CPC, average CPM and conversions, with CSV export and device, country and platform breakdowns. Impressions and clicks refresh about every 15 minutes, but spend can lag seven to eight hours.
Conversions come from the OpenAI Pixel, the Conversions API, or both. On a click OpenAI appends a click reference called oppref to the landing URL; the Pixel stores it in a first-party cookie, and you should pass it with server-side events. Keep oppref through redirects, and use one event ID when a conversion is sent both ways so it counts once. Reporting windows can be 7, 14 or 30 days click-through, with one-day view-through on or off, and totals may include modelled conversions.
Tag every destination URL with your own UTMs; OpenAI confirms they persist on ad clicks. Use a distinct source such as utm_source=chatgpt_ads with utm_medium=cpc, because ChatGPT also sends unpaid visitors when its answers link to your site, and without a distinct tag the two blend in GA4. Our free UTM builder keeps tags consistent.
Expect the numbers to disagree. OpenAI lists the usual reasons its counts differ from GA4: attribution windows, time zones, consent, deduplication and modelled conversions. Compare like with like and judge the channel on your own CRM. OpenAI states there are no performance benchmarks for ChatGPT Ads yet, so treat any "average CTR" you read elsewhere with suspicion.
ChatGPT Ads vs Google Search vs Meta
If Google Search works for you, ChatGPT Ads is the closest new channel in spirit: people are asking, comparing and deciding. The difference is control. You cannot add a negative keyword or see which conversations triggered your ad, so the work shifts from query management to accurate context hints and landing pages that answer the question.
If you rely on Meta, remember that ChatGPT Ads is not audience-first; with a 25,000-user floor for included audiences, small advertisers will mostly buy on context. Run a first campaign as a test with its own budget and a clear stop rule, not as a replacement for a channel you understand.
| ChatGPT Ads | Google Search | Meta | |
|---|---|---|---|
| How intent is read | The conversation, plus context hints and landing page | The search query, matched to keywords | Who the person is: interests, behaviour, lookalikes |
| Main lever | Context hints and creative variety | Keywords, match types and negatives | Audience and creative |
| Where the ad sits | Below a ChatGPT answer | Above and below search results | Feeds, Stories and Reels |
| Buying models | CPM, CPC, oCPC, oCPM (beta) | CPC and automated bidding to CPA or ROAS | Mostly impression billing, optimised to the objective |
| Negative targeting | Audience and location exclusions; no negative keywords | Negative keywords and exclusions | Audience and placement exclusions |
| Maturity | Beta since May 2026; no published benchmarks | Mature | Mature |
Managing ChatGPT Ads from Claude or ChatGPT with an MCP server
OpenAI has its own ChatGPT Ads Manager inside ChatGPT for eligible business advertisers. If ChatGPT Ads is your only channel, start there. The case for an MCP server is seeing ChatGPT Ads beside Google Ads, Meta and your analytics in one assistant.
MCP Ads connects ChatGPT Ads to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other MCP clients with an API key from OpenAI Ads Manager, under Settings. Each key belongs to one ad account, so an agency adds one per client. The key is checked against the live API before it is stored, encrypted. The ChatGPT Ads docs page walks through it.
There are 15 ChatGPT Ads tools. Claude can read the ad account, campaigns, ad groups and ads; create a campaign with a name and lifetime budget; create an ad group with a maximum bid billed on impressions; create a chat card ad from a title, body, landing URL and an already uploaded image; rename or re-budget a campaign; activate, pause or archive a campaign, ad group or ad; and pull daily performance per ad. New items are created paused unless you ask for them live, viewer roles cannot run write tools, and there is no delete tool.
What the tools do not do yet: set objectives, countries, platforms, audiences or daily budgets; create CPC or conversion-optimised ad groups; upload images; or manage the Pixel and product feeds. Insights are per ad, not per campaign. Set those up in Ads Manager, then use Claude to report, compare and switch ads on and off, with prompts like "rank every active ChatGPT ad by spend over 14 days and set it next to last week's Google Ads and Meta CPA". Hosting is $49 a month flat with a 3-day free trial; see pricing, or follow the quickstart.
