ChatGPT Ads

ChatGPT Ads are sponsored placements that OpenAI shows inside ChatGPT, labeled as sponsored and placed below the assistant's answer. They are shown to logged-in adult users on the Free and Go plans and matched to the topic of the conversation. OpenAI says ads do not influence the answer itself.

OpenAI began testing ads in the US on February 9, 2026. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education accounts are ad-free, and Free users can opt out in exchange for fewer daily messages. The pilot moved to Canada, Australia and New Zealand after a March 26 update, launched in the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea by August 11, and expanded to 31 European markets in the week after August 18, with self-service buying there from August 31, 2026 (OpenAI's announcement and updates). By mid-August OpenAI said tens of thousands of marketers had advertised on ChatGPT.

Advertisers buy through Ads Manager at ads.openai.com. According to OpenAI's help center, each ad unit carries an advertiser name, favicon, headline, description, image and landing page. Campaigns can buy on impressions (CPM), on clicks (CPC) or optimize toward a conversion event, and a relevance-weighted second-price auction picks the winner. There are no exact-match keywords. Advertisers write 'context hints' that describe the conversations where their product fits, and the system also weighs the landing page, the ad copy and, if the user allows ad personalization, signals from past chats. Ads are kept away from sensitive topics such as health, mental health and politics, and from users OpenAI identifies or predicts as under 18.

On September 16, 2026 OpenAI added Sponsored Agents, a limited US alpha in which a user who clicks an ad can chat with a business's own AI agent inside ChatGPT, separate from the original conversation. The same release brought an Ads Manager plugin inside ChatGPT, AI-suggested creative, opt-in text customization that adapts headlines to the conversation, and integrations with HubSpot and Shopify.

Landing pages are fetched by OAI-AdsBot, which checks policy compliance and may use page content to judge relevance. It only visits submitted ad URLs and is independent of OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot, so a blocked or challenged landing page can fail review without changing anything about organic visibility (OpenAI crawler docs). See OpenAI crawlers for how the three bots differ.

For AI visibility, the main change is that an ad and the organic answer now share the same screen. A brand that earns a citation or recommendation in ChatGPT search can still find a competitor's sponsored card directly beneath it, and commercial prompts such as 'best CRM for agencies' are where ads concentrate. In our ChatGPT ads tracking, tracked web-search responses carried no ads until May 27, 2026, then more than 30% of them did from July 1.

Teams act on this in three ways. They monitor which advertisers appear on the prompts they care about (Promptwatch's Ads Radar captures the ad, advertiser and triggering prompt for each tracked response). They treat ads as a paid complement to organic AI search ads strategy rather than a substitute, since OpenAI keeps the answer independent. And they check brand safety settings, including Negative Phrases for qualifying advertisers, before scaling spend. Retailers should also watch how ads interact with AI shopping results for product queries.