You can buy ads in ChatGPT today. That is the short answer to the question of how to advertise on ChatGPT in September 2026. The longer one: ads run in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea. From August 24, 2026 they run in 31 European countries as well. They can appear for users on the Free and Go plans, including logged-out ChatGPT, and never for accounts OpenAI identifies as belonging to users under 18. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts see none.
Should you? A measured pilot makes sense when your buyers research their problems in ChatGPT and you can live with contextual targeting. It is the wrong channel if you need job-title targeting or user-level attribution. OpenAI documents neither today. The rest of this guide proves both halves. Then it walks through the setup work that comes before the first dollar.
Who can buy ChatGPT ads right now
The channel went from announcement to 40 countries in seven months. Here is the timeline, every entry dated, because on this platform the date is the fact:
Data table
| Launch date | Countries live |
|---|---|
| Feb 9 (US) | 1 |
| Apr 16 (+ CA, AU, NZ) | 4 |
| Aug 11 (+ UK, MX, BR, JP, KR) | 9 |
| Aug 24 (+ 31 European countries) | 40 |
- Mid-January 2026: OpenAI announced it would test ads in ChatGPT, US only, on the Free and Go tiers.
- February 9: ads went live for logged-in adult users in the US.
- April 16: ads began rolling out in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, after OpenAI announced those pilots on March 26.
- May 5: the self-serve Ads Manager opened in beta.
- First week of August: oCPC bidding in beta, Automatic Advanced Matching (AAM) as the default for new pixels, and multi-product carousels.
- By August 11: the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea had all joined, the UK in June.
- August 24: 31 European countries, the EEA plus Switzerland; OpenAI announced the date the week this article went up.
Count the markets and the curve is steep. One country in February. Four by mid-April, nine by August 11, and 40 from August 24.
Europe comes with conditions. In the EEA and Switzerland, OpenAI’s help center says personalized ads are not initially available, and its Europe privacy policy shows generic ads to users who do not consent to personalized advertising. At launch, buying ran through the OpenAI Ads Solutions team and its agency and technology partners. Self-serve buying in Ads Manager followed on August 31, 2026, as a beta for eligible advertisers.
One more lesson from the timeline. A guide written in February was materially wrong by May. Check the date on anything you read about ChatGPT Ads, this page included.
The two ways to buy: Ads Manager or the managed lane
The self-serve lane is Ads Manager. It follows the structure you already run in Google: campaign, then ad group, then ad. You bid CPM or CPC, with oCPC in beta. Campaigns need a minimum daily budget set by billing currency, which OpenAI lists as $25, €15 or £15. The one speed bump is account verification, covering your identity and your business. It is reported to take three to seven days, so plan on days rather than hours. Some advertisers reported that a verified account still could not run campaigns right away.
OpenAI’s Ads Solutions team runs the managed lane, together with agency and technology partners. Criteo was reported as OpenAI’s first ad tech partner in March 2026. Practitioners have recommended a Criteo route with a reported $10,000 minimum as a cheaper managed entry. In Europe, the managed lane was the only lane at launch, until Ads Manager opened there in beta on August 31, 2026.
The history explains the scary headlines you may remember. Launch-period minimums were reported at $200,000 to $250,000 in committed spend, plus a reported $50,000 pilot tier. Reporting differed on whether those were phases or tiers. Early buying was reported as running on spreadsheets, email and phone calls before Ads Manager existed. All of that is gone. The barrier today is judgment, not budget.
What a ChatGPT ad looks like
Three formats are live as of August 2026. The base unit is a text ad below the answer, visually separate and marked with a Sponsored label. OpenAI states that ads do not influence the answers themselves. Then come two shopping formats. A single-product unit draws from a product feed, using the same file format as Google Shopping. A multi-product carousel has been live since August 7, showing one retailer’s feed per placement. OpenAI’s system decides whether a query gets the carousel or the single unit.
OpenAI’s own documentation, as of September 2026, describes two creative types. A chat card carries your advertiser name, logo, title, copy, image and landing page. A product-ad template takes its image and link from your product feed.
On creative, the honest guidance stays qualitative: expect tight title and description limits and one square image. Write for the conversation the reader is in the middle of rather than for a results page. Your ad lands inside someone’s train of thought, and copy that continues that thought earns the click.
Targeting runs on context hints
There is no keyword bidding. Targeting is mostly contextual. The system reads the conversation, and you steer it with context hints at the ad group level. A context hint is a natural-language description of the situations where your ad should appear. Users who allow it also get personalization from past chats and memory, but that layer is user-side. Advertisers do not control it, and in the EEA and Switzerland ads are contextual at launch.
Now the list that decides whether this channel fits you, all of it checked against OpenAI’s documentation in September 2026. OpenAI documents location, platform and custom audience targeting plus context hints. Job-title, company, industry and firmographic targeting are not among the documented options, and neither are lookalike or website retargeting audiences. A list of companies is not something you can upload. What you can upload is a list of people: custom audiences take email addresses, phone numbers, hashed versions of both, or Google Advertising IDs, and let you include, exclude or bid differently on the people who match. OpenAI gives 25,000 matched users as the planning threshold for inclusion and bid adjustments, and custom audiences are not available for campaigns in the EEA or Switzerland. Reporting shows impressions, clicks, spend and conversions, broken down by country and device, not by who saw the ad.
Agencies running the channel keep reporting the same craft mistake. Advertisers write context hints that describe the product instead of the conversations the ad belongs in. “B2B security platform for mid-market companies” describes a product. “The user is asking how to reduce alert fatigue in a small security team” describes a conversation. The system can only act on the second.
Reported prices, because OpenAI publishes no rate card
Every number in this section carries the word reported, because OpenAI publishes no rate card. Launch CPMs were reported around $60. By mid-2026, observed CPMs were reported at $25 to $60. CPCs are reported at roughly $3 to $8 with wide category variation. B2B categories are reported higher, up to the low teens in tests.
Suggested bids and real bids have diverged in published tests. One published test reported a suggested CPC near $3. The campaign only paced at bids around $12 and landed at roughly a $9 average CPC. That is one test, and nothing more. Its lesson is narrower: treat the suggested bid as an opening estimate, and budget for discovery.
Published outcomes span the whole range. VistaPrint reported that the majority of its ChatGPT-driven traffic was new visitors, a discovery skew most channels would envy. One published $1,000 test reported 92 clicks at around $13 each and zero conversions. Both are real. So fund this as an incremental learning budget with a defined pilot window, and leave your Google and LinkedIn lines intact. That is how we size test channels inside a wider international PPC plan too. Budget what you can afford to learn with.
The B2B math nobody runs
Ads reach the Free and Go tiers only. The number of ads a Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise or Edu subscriber sees is zero. If your B2B decision-makers sit on those ad-free paid tiers, part of your buying committee may never see a ChatGPT ad at any budget.
Data table
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| of commercial prompts carried an ad in SE Ranking’s August 2026 study | 25.94% |
| ads shown on the paid Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise tiers | 0 |
That is half the math. Here is the other half. Practitioners, champions and researchers may sit on the free side, and the inventory on commercial conversations is real. SE Ranking measured ads on 25.94% of the commercial prompts in its August 2026 study. The conversations you want are carrying ads; the open question is who is having them on which tier.
So the reach exists and the identity targeting does not. A B2B pilot has to bridge that gap by design. Write context hints for the problems your practitioners research. Then measure whether those visits turn into named accounts in the CRM, instead of assuming the CFO will click.
Your first campaign, step by step, and when to wait
The order matters more than the settings. Measurement comes before money.
- Check eligibility. Is your market live? Is your category allowed? Per OpenAI’s ad policies, gambling, tobacco, recreational drugs, alcohol, political campaigning, adult content and certain financial products are out. Financial, health and legal services are approved case by case in the US, and OpenAI’s policy generally prohibits them outside it. Read the live policy page before you plan anything.
- Build measurement before you spend. OpenAI appends its own click reference, called oppref, to the landing page URL, and Ads Manager can fill ID macros such as campaign_id into query parameters you add. UTM passthrough is inconsistent, so untagged paid clicks can land in GA4 as Direct or as generic chatgpt.com referral. Put a UTM convention on every final URL. Install the OpenAI Pixel and add the Conversions API, which OpenAI describes as the more reliable of the two. Build a GA4 custom channel group for chatgpt referrers, and add source fields in the CRM. Verify test events before launch. The full setup lives in our ChatGPT ads measurement guide.
- Write context hints from real buyer conversations. Pull them from sales calls and support tickets, and document what each hint is meant to catch.
- Build the creative. Copy for the Sponsored unit, and a product feed if you sell products.
- Set a small budget, a fixed pilot window, and one success metric agreed in writing. A pilot without a stated metric produces an opinion rather than a decision.
- Read the results weekly, joined to the CRM. Watch pacing closely, because pilot advertisers reported under-delivery against committed spend. Re-check the platform state monthly; this channel changes between reporting cycles.
And when should you wait? When your buyers sit only in markets where ads are not yet live, or your category is prohibited. If your board demands user-level attribution, wait too, because no advertiser here gets it. Same call if your ICP is a narrow EU niche where the channel has only just opened. Waiting is a defensible position here. Prepare the measurement and the context hints now, and the pilot starts fast the day you decide to run.
What COSEOM® does for clients on this channel lives at ChatGPT Ads management.
FAQ: how to advertise on ChatGPT
How do I buy ads on ChatGPT?
You open an Ads Manager account in a market where self-serve is live, verify it, then build a campaign, an ad group and ads, bidding CPM or CPC. The managed alternative: larger buyers go through the OpenAI Ads Solutions team or agency and technology partners. That was the only route in Europe at the August 24, 2026 launch, until Ads Manager opened there in beta on August 31.
Does ChatGPT have ads now?
What a Free or Go user sees today can include a Sponsored unit below the answer: as of August 2026 ads are live in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea, and they have run since February 9, 2026. They can appear for users on the Free and Go plans, including logged-out ChatGPT, and never for accounts OpenAI identifies as belonging to users under 18. Another 31 European countries joined on August 24, 2026, and on August 31 OpenAI put its count at more than 40 countries.
Is there a minimum spend for ChatGPT ads?
Yes, a small one. Self-serve campaigns need a minimum daily budget set by billing currency, which OpenAI lists as $25, €15 or £15. The $200,000 to $250,000 commitments and the $50,000 pilot tier were reported launch-phase arrangements. They are history. A $10,000 minimum has been reported for the managed Criteo route.
How much does it cost to advertise on ChatGPT?
Reported figures, and they are only that, put mid-2026 CPMs at $25 to $60 and CPCs at roughly $3 to $8, with B2B categories reported higher. Self-serve starts at a minimum daily budget of $25 for USD accounts. OpenAI publishes no rate card, so the honest budget is whatever lets you run a clean pilot and learn something from it.
Can you target job titles or companies on ChatGPT?
No. As of September 2026, OpenAI documents location, platform and custom audience targeting plus context hints; job-title, company, industry, firmographic, lookalike and website retargeting options are not among them. Reporting shows campaign performance by country and device, not who saw the ad. Outside the EEA and Switzerland you can upload a list of people, such as customer emails, as a custom audience, but not a list of companies. The rest is contextual: you write context hints describing the conversations your ad belongs in, and the system matches them. If your plan requires knowing who saw the ad, this channel cannot tell you yet.
Are ChatGPT ads available in Europe?
If your buyers are in the EEA or Switzerland, you can reach them: ads arrived across 31 European countries on August 24, 2026. Ads there are contextual at launch: OpenAI’s help center says personalized ads are not initially available in the EEA or Switzerland, and its Europe privacy policy shows generic ads to users who do not consent to personalized advertising. Buying ran through the OpenAI Ads Solutions team and partners first, and self-serve Ads Manager opened there in beta on August 31, 2026. Custom audiences are not available for campaigns in the EEA or Switzerland.
Do ads change ChatGPT’s answers?
No, they do not. OpenAI states that ads do not influence answers; the ad sits below the response under a Sponsored label. Getting your brand cited inside the answers themselves is a separate, organic discipline, closer to SEO than to media buying. That side of the work is covered in our AI marketing service.
What do ChatGPT ads look like?
As of August 2026 there are three labeled formats. The base one is a text unit below the answer. Shopping adds a single-product unit drawn from a product feed, plus a multi-product carousel, one retailer per placement. Every format carries the Sponsored label. OpenAI documents two creative types as of September 2026: a chat card with a title, copy, image and landing page, and a product-ad template filled from a product feed.
COSEOM Team
COSEOM is a multilingual B2B growth agency. Since 2008 the COSEOM team has run international SEO, generative engine optimization, paid media and demand generation programs for B2B software and technology companies, in English, German, Spanish and Portuguese. This account publishes our research, playbooks and product guides. More about COSEOM