How to Advertise on ChatGPT: A Buyer's Guide for 2026

OpenAI now sells ChatGPT ads the way Google and Meta sell theirs: through a self-serve auction. A business based in any of 55 countries can open an account in OpenAI Ads Manager, pass verification, and bid for the space below ChatGPT's answers by the click or by the thousand impressions.

This guide is for the marketer who wants to run a first ChatGPT test properly. It covers who sees the ads, how to set up an account, what to bid, how to write for a placement that has no keywords, and how to tell whether the test worked. Every OpenAI fact below comes from OpenAI's own help center as of September 2026, and each section links to the page it came from, because the details are still changing month to month.

What changed since ChatGPT ads launched?

OpenAI began testing ads in the US on February 9, 2026. For the first months, access ran through a limited pilot, and most of what was written about ChatGPT advertising in the spring — minimums, waitlists, fixed CPMs — described that pilot. It no longer describes how buying works.

Today the default route is Ads Manager Beta: you sign up, get reviewed, add a card, and launch. Self-serve is open to advertisers whose billing entity sits in one of the countries OpenAI lists as available, which include the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, most of the European Union, Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan, Korea, Brazil and Mexico. OpenAI's help center publishes no minimum spend for self-serve accounts; you control budget through your campaign settings and bids. Larger advertisers can still ask OpenAI's sales team for support.

Who sees ChatGPT ads, and where do they appear?

Ads appear below the end of a ChatGPT response, labelled as sponsored and visually separate from the answer. OpenAI states that ads do not influence what ChatGPT says, and that advertisers cannot shape or rank its responses.

The audience is narrower than "everyone who uses ChatGPT":

• Ads can appear for users on the Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts see no ads.
• Accounts identified as belonging to people under 18 see no ads.
• Ads are not eligible to appear near sensitive or regulated topics, including personal health, mental health and politics, and political advertising is not allowed.
• Temporary Chats show no ads, and the ChatGPT Atlas browser shows none during the test.
• Personalised ads are not initially available in the European Economic Area or Switzerland; ads there rely on the current conversation.

Each ad carries the advertiser name, a favicon, a headline, a description, an image and a landing page, according to OpenAI's ad format documentation. When there is a relevant match, a user may see one or more ad units under a response, from one or several advertisers.

How do you set up an OpenAI Ads Manager account?

OpenAI's setup guide breaks it into five steps. Campaigns will not deliver until all of them are complete.

1. Create the account. Sign in with an OpenAI account tied to your work email, or create one during sign-up. One person per business should create the advertiser account and invite the rest.
2. Enter business and account details. Business name, website, logo and industry, then country, currency and time zone. Country, currency and time zone cannot be changed later, so enter the entity that will actually be billed.
3. Complete verification. You answer a few questions through Persona, then the account goes into a review queue. OpenAI says review may take some time because applications are handled in a rolling queue; it also checks that your products are eligible under its ad policies.
4. Finish account info. Once access is granted, set the account name and logo exactly as they should appear in the ad unit. Ads will not serve until this is done.
5. Set up billing and invite your team. Create a billing profile, add a credit card, then invite colleagues under Settings.

Build verification time into your plan. If you need to be live by a specific date, start the account a few weeks earlier than you would for a search campaign. Agencies should note that each advertiser needs its own account.

How does bidding work, and what should you budget?

ChatGPT ads use impression and valid-click billing. You choose one of three objectives:

• Views — impression-based buying with a maximum CPM bid, for reach.
• Clicks — a maximum CPC bid, for traffic.
• Conversions — optimised toward a supported conversion event. With click billing (oCPC) you still pay for valid clicks, not conversions.

Bids are set at the ad-group level. For CPC campaigns OpenAI recommends starting with a maximum bid of $3–$5 per click, and Ads Manager may show bid-strength guidance. Ads compete in a relevance-weighted, second-price auction, so an ad that fits the conversation well can win a placement without having the highest bid.

A simple way to size a first test is to work back from the clicks you need to learn anything. As an illustration: if you want around 500 clicks to judge landing-page conversion, a $4 maximum CPC puts the test at roughly $2,000 before the auction discount. Your actual cost per click depends on competition in your category. For a longer look at pricing, see what ChatGPT ads cost.

How do you target without keywords?

There is no keyword list to bid on. At the ad-group level you write context hints: plain descriptions of the conversations, topics or keywords where your product is relevant. OpenAI is explicit that hints are not exact-match keywords and do not guarantee delivery. The system also looks at your landing page, headline and copy when deciding whether an ad fits, and, where the user has personalisation on, at signals from their wider ChatGPT use.

Three habits help:

• Organise ad groups by the job the user is doing, not by product line. "Comparing project-management tools for a small agency" is a better hint than "project management software".
• Keep headline, copy and landing page consistent with the hint. Because the landing page is itself a matching signal, a generic homepage weakens the whole ad group.
• Write for someone who is mid-decision. The person seeing your ad has just read an answer. Specifics — price, delivery time, a concrete outcome — do more work than brand claims.

In the campaigns we run, conversation context is only part of what decides whether an ad performs. Other factors move click-through rate too, and we tune campaigns for them using what we see across our own inventory. The practical lesson for a first test: treat relevance as the entry ticket, then test creative and landing pages as deliberately as you would in search.

How do you measure a ChatGPT ads test?

Ads Manager Beta reports impressions, clicks, spend, CTR, average CPC, average CPM and conversions. Impressions, clicks and CTR refresh about every 15 minutes; spend can lag by 7–8 hours, so a $0 spend next to live clicks does not mean nothing has been charged.

• Set up conversion measurement in Ads Manager before launch if you plan to use the Conversions objective or judge the test on outcomes.
• Add UTM parameters to every landing-page URL. They persist on ad clicks, so ChatGPT traffic shows up separately in the analytics you already use.
• Expect aggregate data only. Advertisers receive totals such as views and clicks; OpenAI does not share conversations or user-level data.

Judge the test on cost per qualified outcome, not on CTR alone. A placement that appears after a detailed answer can send fewer but better-informed visitors than a search ad.

Should you buy ChatGPT on its own?

ChatGPT is the largest AI assistant, but its ads only reach people on the Free and Go plans, only in supported markets, and only when a conversation is eligible. People also ask for recommendations in other AI apps and assistants, and the same buyer may move between them.

That is the case for treating AI inventory as one channel rather than one app at a time. Thrad lets you run one budget across the AI apps your customers already use, with one set of reporting. If you are weighing the wider landscape first, our ChatGPT ads alternatives guide compares every route to reach people in AI conversations.

What does a sensible first 90 days look like?

Month 1: set up and launch

Open the account early to absorb verification time. Pick one product line and two or three decision-stage ad groups, each with its own context hints, headline and landing page. Set up conversion measurement and UTMs before the first dollar is spent. Start on Clicks at the suggested bid range.

Month 2: read the signal and iterate

Compare ad groups on cost per qualified outcome. Rewrite the weakest hints and landing pages rather than raising bids. If one ad group is clearly working, try the Conversions objective on it.

Month 3: scale or widen

Move budget into what worked and add adjacent ad groups. This is also the point to test the same message on AI inventory beyond ChatGPT, so you know whether the result is about ChatGPT or about reaching buyers inside AI conversations generally.

How to get started

If ChatGPT is the channel you want to test, start at ads.openai.com and work through the setup above. To reach buyers across the AI apps your customers already use, launch a campaign on Thrad's self-serve platform with no minimum, or, from $10k a month, talk to us about managed service.