ChatGPT ads are sponsored placements that appear below a ChatGPT response, marked Sponsored and kept separate from the answer, bought through Ads Manager, OpenAI’s advertising platform. They’re currently in testing, they show only to users on the Free and Go plans, and an ad never appears inside the answer itself.
ChatGPT advertising is priced in a relevance-weighted auction rather than from a rate card: you pay by impression or by click, from a minimum daily budget, and the reported launch-era pricing has fallen a long way since. What an ad can’t buy is the recommendation inside the answer, because OpenAI’s own docs say ads don’t influence responses. Being the brand ChatGPT recommends is organic work, the half of AI search visibility you measure rather than bid for.
What ChatGPT ads are
ChatGPT ads are display units: the advertiser’s name, a favicon, a title, a line of copy, an image and a landing page, shown below the end of a response. OpenAI’s page on the basics of ChatGPT ads lists those parts, plus the safety rules around them: no ads near sensitive contexts, and negative phrases a qualifying advertiser can add to keep clear of others. There’s no slot inside the answer text, and no way to buy one.
Who sees them matters as much as the format. Testing started in the United States on February 9, 2026, and ads currently appear only for users on the Free and Go plans, per OpenAI’s ads FAQ: Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts see none, and no accounts identified as under 18 do either. They also don’t show up in the Atlas browser or in Temporary Chats.
How ChatGPT ads work
Advertising on ChatGPT currently runs on relevance first. The system picks the ad it expects to match the conversation’s context and intent, drawing on the landing page, the title and copy, advertiser context hints, and, when personalisation is on, select signals from the user’s wider ChatGPT experience. Ranking then blends relevance with your bid in a relevance-weighted second-price auction, so the most relevant ad doesn’t need the highest bid to win.
Context hints are where paid-media operators trip first, because they look like keywords and aren’t. They sit at the ad group level, they describe the kinds of conversations you want your ad near, they’re not exact-match keywords, and delivery isn’t guaranteed. So there’s no query report to optimise against, and no position you can buy your way onto.
Personalisation is the other lever. Ads can use past chats and memory if the user has them enabled, users can turn that off, and ads using personalisation aren’t initially available in the European Economic Area (EEA) or Switzerland. What you get back is aggregated reporting only: OpenAI says advertisers never receive chats, history, memories or personal details.
What ChatGPT ads cost
How much ChatGPT ads cost is set by the auction and your budget settings, because OpenAI publishes no rate card. The published floor is a $25 USD minimum daily budget, which varies by billing currency, and OpenAI’s campaign page recommends new advertisers start with a daily budget: daily spend won’t exceed twice that budget, or seven times it across a week. For the bid, OpenAI recommends starting at $3 to $5 per click on click campaigns.
| Billing model | You pay for | How it’s billed |
|---|---|---|
| Views | Impressions | Cost per thousand impressions (CPM) |
| Clicks | Clicks | Cost per click (CPC) |
| Conversions | Valid clicks | oCPC, bidding optimised for conversions, charged per valid click |
Those settings are the floor, not the price: what advertisers actually paid is press-reported. Digiday reported in April 2026 that launch-phase CPMs ran around $60 and had fallen to as low as $25, with the agency Jellyfish seeing averages near $45, and Ad Age reporting as low as $15. The same piece reported minimum spend falling from $250,000 at launch to about $50,000.
For scale, the same article quoted Gupta Media’s comparison CPMs: $4.82 on Facebook, $7.63 on Instagram, $10.33 on Google Display, $3.02 on TikTok and $39.19 on LinkedIn. Even after the fall, ChatGPT inventory was reported selling at a premium to most social platforms, which is pretty normal for a small, new auction. Whether that premium survives a bigger one is an open question.
The rough arithmetic is worth doing before you brief anyone. At those reported CPMs, a $25 daily budget buys somewhere around 400 to 1,000 impressions a day. A read that means anything takes a couple of weeks at that rate, so don’t judge the channel on day one.
Reporting has two quirks worth knowing. Impressions, clicks and click-through rate (CTR) refresh about every 15 minutes, but spend can lag seven to eight hours, so a zero on day one doesn’t mean nothing accrued. And conversions only show up once conversion measurement is set up.
How to run ChatGPT ads
You run ChatGPT ads through Ads Manager at ads.openai.com, currently in beta, and the shape is familiar if you’ve run search or social campaigns. OpenAI’s quickstart walks the whole path, and the short version looks like this:
- Check availability first: self-serve currently requires your advertising legal entity to be based in one of the 63 supported countries. If yours isn’t listed, you can still create an account and get notified.
- Set up the account: work email, brand logo, billing profile and verification. Ads only go live after review.
- Build campaign, ad groups, then ads: the campaign carries the objective, budget and targeting; the ad group carries the context hints describing the conversations you want to be near; the ad carries the creative and landing page. Guided creation and bulk upload both exist.
- Set the budget: start with a daily budget at or above the minimum, which is what OpenAI recommends for new advertisers. Skip a campaign-total budget until you have a read on performance.
- Measure what arrived: Ads Manager reports impressions, clicks, spend, CTR, average CPC, average CPM and conversions, and UTM parameters persist on clicks, so your existing analytics sees the traffic. Then give it a couple of weeks at your budget before you judge it.
What ChatGPT ads can’t buy
The one thing ChatGPT ads can’t buy is the recommendation inside the answer, and OpenAI says so itself: ads do not influence ChatGPT answers, they run on separate systems, and advertisers can’t shape, rank or alter responses. An ad isn’t an endorsement either, per the same FAQ. So the slot you’re buying sits below the answer, and the answer is the part the buyer asked for.
The reach limit cuts the same way. ChatGPT shows no ads on Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise or Edu accounts, so those users see your brand only if the answer recommends it, and the answers they read aren’t shaped by any ad budget. That’s worth writing into any budget case: the deepest users of the platform are unreachable by the ad channel entirely.
What does decide the recommendation is retrieval: the searches the assistant runs and the pages it reads. In our Credibility Layer study, 200 reasoning sessions produced 5,933 searches and 1,982 citations, every recommendation came out of a 30-search credibility audit, and Reddit was cited zero times. Where you ranked barely moved it.
And you can’t read organic visibility off Google either. In our 10x AI Visibility Refresh, 41 cited pages had no Google impressions at all, and the correlation between rank and citation was basically zero over 91 days. Refreshing 98 posts and publishing nothing new still moved citations 10x in that window, which is the number to show anyone weighing paid against organic.
Paid and organic AI visibility together
You don’t need ads to be visible in ChatGPT, because visibility in ChatGPT is the answer, and ads never appear inside the answer. What makes you visible is being recommended when a buyer asks, which no ad budget buys: it’s decided by the pages the model reads. An ad buys a labelled slot below the answer, on Free and Go conversations, for as long as the budget lasts.
They also land on the same buyer differently. Someone who asks ChatGPT for a recommendation and sees your ad under a competitor’s name in the answer got a different message than the one you paid for. Measuring the organic half separately tells you whether visibility in ChatGPT came from the ads, the answers, or the pages you worked.
This is the split Omnipresence measures. It tracks whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity recommend you or a competitor for the buyer questions you care about, shows the searches each assistant ran before answering and the pages that won, and keeps a few questions untouched as controls, so you can prove the lift came from your work rather than a platform shift. The honest limits: four assistants only, you bring your own model key, and it measures recommendations and citations rather than revenue.
So buy reach where the auction is cheap enough for your numbers, and work the recommendation as its own channel with its own measurement. If you want to see which questions decide your category, you can point Omnipresence at one brand for a week.
FAQ
Can you pay ChatGPT to recommend your product?
No. Ads are separate from the answers, they don’t influence them, and they never appear inside one, per OpenAI’s own documentation. The recommendation is decided by retrieval, and the way to earn it is to be the page the model reads and quotes.
Can you advertise on ChatGPT outside the United States?
You can, as long as your advertising legal entity is based in a country where self-serve is currently available; testing started in the United States and has expanded since. Larger advertisers can contact sales instead.
Is advertising on ChatGPT worth it?
It depends what you’re buying. Reach next to relevant conversations, shown to Free and Go users, is measurable in Ads Manager, and reported pricing has fallen a long way since launch. The recommendation inside the answer isn’t for sale at any budget, so if that’s the goal, the work is organic.