Advertising on ChatGPT, set up and compared with your Google numbers

Where ChatGPT ads appear

Ads show under ChatGPT's answer as a separate unit with a sponsored label. OpenAI says advertising does not influence the answers and that conversations are kept private from advertisers. You see aggregated results, never what someone typed.

Only adults on the Free and Go plans see ads. Plus, Pro and Enterprise stay ad-free, and accounts that OpenAI believes belong to someone under 18 get no ads either. Ads are also kept away from conversations about health, mental health and politics.

How it got here so fast

OpenAI announced the test in January 2026 and started the US pilot in February. In August ads came to 31 European markets, and on 31 August self-service Ads Manager opened there. OpenAI's help centre now lists 89 countries where a business can buy ads itself, the UK, the US and Poland among them.

Searches show the same jump. In the US, searches for "chatgpt ads" went from 4,400 a month in October 2025 to 27,100 in September 2026. In the UK, from 1,300 to 8,100.

Context hints instead of keywords

There are no keywords. Each ad group gets context hints, short plain sentences about what you sell, who it helps and when it is useful. OpenAI's own example for a plumber reads "after-hours residential plumbing in [city], with an $89 service-call fee for urgent repairs".

OpenAI is clear that hints are not targeting rules. They help the system judge relevance and do not promise that your ad will show in a given conversation. Location, schedule and exclusions are set with the campaign controls. Writing good hints is closer to writing a brief for a new salesperson than to building a keyword list.

How you pay

You can buy clicks or conversions. Since 9 November 2026 new campaigns get Target CPC and Target CPA in place of a fixed maximum bid, and the system bids above or below your target in each auction to hit the average. The bid that wins is something you cannot watch directly, so the target has to come from your real cost per lead on Google.

The daily budget is an average over a week. On a single day spend can reach twice the daily budget, and across seven days it never goes above seven times it. People who expect Google's day-by-day caps get a surprise on the first Monday.

Tracking you can check

ChatGPT adds its own click reference, oppref, to the landing page address. The OpenAI Pixel stores it and links later purchases or leads back to the click. The Conversions API sends the same events from your server or CRM, and when both send one event they need the same event ID, otherwise it counts twice.

We also tag every ad with UTM parameters so the traffic lands in your GA4 next to Google and Microsoft. That way you compare channels in one report you already trust, not in each platform's own view of itself.

Product feed ads for online stores

A store can upload its catalogue to Ads Manager as a CSV file, a hosted link or over SFTP, and ChatGPT builds product ads with the photo, price and sale price. Products expire from the feed after two weeks, so a single upload means the ads stop two weeks later, without any warning. We set a scheduled link to the feed you already keep for Google Merchant Center.

If the Google feed is a mess, ChatGPT will show the same mess. Titles, prices and availability get fixed first.

Being in the answer without paying

An ad is one way to show up in ChatGPT. The other is to be the page it quotes. ChatGPT search reads the web with its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot, so robots.txt must let it in. Our own site lets it in and publishes an llms.txt summary, and we check the same on client sites while setting up the ads.