ChatGPT Ads & OpenAI Advertising Glossary

The layer between a campaign and an ad. An ad group holds its context hints (up to 2,000 per ad group) and, for Reach campaigns, the maximum CPM bid.

Campaign targeting Bidding and budgets

OpenAI’s self-serve platform for building, funding and reviewing ChatGPT ad campaigns — campaign and ad group structure, targeting, creative, budgets, billing and reporting. Self-serve availability is limited to advertisers whose legal entity is based in one of the 63 listed countries.

Ads Manager availability Ads in ChatGPT: the basics

OAI-AdsBot is OpenAI’s advertising crawler — the automated agent OpenAI uses for advertising-related crawling of the web. It is a separate user agent from OpenAI’s other crawlers, so it should be checked and logged separately in your server data.

OpenAI crawler checker OAI-AdsBot simulator

The practice of making content easy for AI assistants to retrieve, understand and quote when they answer questions. It overlaps with traditional SEO, but the target is the generated answer rather than a ranked list of links.

The period after an ad interaction during which a conversion still counts. Click-through attribution uses the window you configure (OpenAI’s documentation illustrates a 30-day example), while view-through attribution is fixed at 1 day and reported separately. When both apply, the click takes precedence.

Conversion tracking

The description text that sits under the headline: 32–48 characters recommended, 100 characters maximum under the bulk upload campaign schema.

Bulk upload schema checklist

The controls that keep ads away from unsuitable content: placement guardrails, automated review with human oversight, a Negative Phrases control for qualifying advertisers, and brand-suitability pilots with DoubleVerify and IAS. Ads never appear near sensitive or regulated topics such as personal health, mental health or politics.

OpenAI ad policies

The top-level object in Ads Manager: it carries the objective, budget and bidding settings and contains the ad groups and ads. Geography, platform and audience targeting are configured as campaign targeting.

Campaign targeting

The API creative type for a single sponsored card — the standard ad unit that renders below a ChatGPT response. The feed-driven alternative is the product ad template.

Ads API reference

Descriptive signals — up to 2,000 per ad group — that explain your product and use cases so the ad can be matched to relevant conversations. They are not exact-match keywords and do not replace geographic, platform or audience targeting.

Campaign targeting

A business action you configure Ads Manager to count — an order, a lead, a signup — measured through the measurement pixel or the Conversions API. Ads are never billed per conversion; conversion data feeds reporting and, with oCPC or oCPM, bid optimization.

Billing and payment Supported events

The server-to-server measurement channel. Events are posted to https://bzr.openai.com/v1/events with a pixel ID and authenticated by an OPENAI_CONVERSIONS_API_KEY; setup calls run against api.ads.openai.com/v1/conversions/* and a validate_only mode lets you test payloads without sending events.

Conversion tracking

An audience built from customer identifiers you supply — email, phone, their SHA-256 variants, or GAID. Inclusion targeting and bid multipliers require at least 25,000 matched users; exclusion audiences have no minimum. Uploads are capped at 500,000,000 bytes.

Campaign targeting

An event you define when no standard event fits, sent with oaiq("measure", "custom", …) and a custom_event_name. Names run 1–64 characters, may contain letters, numbers, underscore and dash, must start and end alphanumeric, and must not collide with a standard event name.

Supported events

The amount a campaign may spend per day, treated as a 7-day average: spend can reach 2× the daily budget on a single day and up to 7× across the 7-day window. Minimums vary by market and currency; the documented standard minimum for US dollar accounts is $25/day in the US.

Daily budgets

How OpenAI stops the same conversion being counted twice when it arrives from both the browser pixel and the Conversions API. The match key is pixel ID + event name + event_id, and the first event received wins.

Conversion tracking

Your unique identifier for one conversion, passed to the pixel or Conversions API as event_id. Generate it once — an order ID works well — and reuse the exact same value on both channels so they deduplicate.

Conversion tracking

Targets that remove locations or audiences from delivery. In geographic targeting, exclusions always win over inclusions, and exclusion audiences have no 25,000-user minimum.

Campaign targeting

The small site icon shown next to the advertiser name inside a ChatGPT ad. The ad unit as a whole displays the advertiser name, favicon or logo, headline, copy, a landing-page link and an image.

Ads in ChatGPT

The work of increasing the chance that generative AI systems cite or mention your content in the answers they produce. It shares territory with AEO and with structured, machine-readable content work.

The downloadable list of geographic targets OpenAI publishes as a CSV at ads.openai.com/assets/openai-geotargets.csv. It maps the location IDs and country codes usable in campaign geo targeting.

Geo target catalog CSV

One of the two ChatGPT plans that see ads. Ads are shown only to logged-in users on the Free and Go plans — Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education subscribers do not see them.

Ads in ChatGPT

The character budget for an ad’s title: 16–24 characters recommended and 50 characters maximum under the bulk upload schema. Through the API, a title must be 3–50 characters.

Bulk upload schema checklist

One render of an ad in front of a user. Impressions are the billing basis for CPM and oCPM campaigns, which are costed per 1,000 impressions.

Billing and payment

The smallest denomination of a currency as defined by ISO 4217 — cents for USD, yen for JPY. Whenever an amount is sent with a conversion it must be an integer in these minor units, and currency is required with it: 2599 means $25.99 and 8900 means JPY 8,900.

Supported events

One of the 13 standard events, sent when someone submits a lead form. It is the usual optimized conversion for service and B2B advertisers.

Supported events

The identifier for a geographic target in OpenAI’s geo catalog, used alongside ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes. An inclusion or exclusion list accepts up to 2,500 IDs.

Campaign targeting

OpenAI’s browser-side measurement SDK, served from https://bzrcdn.openai.com/sdk/oaiq.min.js. It exposes the global oaiq queue: consent first, then init with your pixel ID, then measure calls for each event.

Measurement pixel docs

The unit used for API budgets and bids: 1,000,000 micros equal one account-currency unit. Daily minimums depend on the account currency, and a value that is too low returns an error stating the required amount.

Bidding and budgets

A control that lets qualifying advertisers specify phrases they do not want associated with their ads. It sits alongside placement guardrails and automated review with human oversight as part of brand suitability.

OpenAI ad policies

The global JavaScript function the measurement pixel defines on the page. The call sequence is oaiq("consent", …) before init, oaiq("init", { pixelId }), then oaiq("measure", event, data, options) for each tracked action.

Measurement pixel docs

The goal a campaign is built around, which also decides the billing model: Views bills on CPM, Clicks bills on CPC, and conversion-optimized campaigns bill on oCPC (per click) or oCPM (per impression). Ads are never billed per conversion.

Billing and payment

Conversion-optimized bidding that is still billed per click. OpenAI optimizes delivery toward the conversion event you configured while you pay for each click.

Billing and payment

Conversion-optimized bidding billed per impression. You pay per 1,000 impressions while delivery is optimized toward your configured conversion event.

Billing and payment

The first-party cookie that stores the ad click reference attached to ChatGPT Ads landing URLs, with a 30-day lifetime, so later conversion events still connect to that click. A companion __obref cookie lasts 365 days.

Measurement pixel docs

One of the 13 standard events, sent when an order is confirmed. For e-commerce it is the business conversion that campaigns optimize toward.

Supported events

One of the 13 standard events, sent when a relevant page is viewed. It is the simplest event to send first while you wire up the rest of the funnel.

Supported events

The spend level at which a postpay card account is charged. The documented US progression is $25 → $50 → $100 → $200, plus a month-end balance charge, and thresholds cannot be set manually.

Billing and payment

The identifier of the data source (pixel) you create in Ads Manager. It is passed to oaiq("init", { pixelId }) and forms part of the deduplication key alongside event name and event_id.

Measurement pixel docs

The API creative type that builds ads from a product feed, sitting alongside chat_card for single-card creative. It is how catalogs scale beyond hand-written ads.

Ads API reference

An impression-billed campaign built for visibility rather than clicks, using the Views objective and CPM pricing. Its maximum CPM bid is set at the ad-group level.

Bidding and budgets

The auction OpenAI runs for ads: relevance factors into eligibility and outcomes, and pricing follows second-price logic rather than first-price. Your maximum bid acts as a ceiling, not an automatic charge.

Bidding and budgets

An ad that opens a business-sponsored AI agent inside ChatGPT. It is in a limited alpha for selected advertisers only, and OpenAI is not accepting early-access requests for it.

Sponsored Agents help article

The clearly labeled ad unit that renders below a ChatGPT response, showing the advertiser name, favicon or logo, headline, copy, a landing-page link and an image. It never appears inside the answer itself.

Ads in ChatGPT

The 13 built-in measurement events: app_installed, app_opened, appointment_scheduled, checkout_started, contents_viewed, custom, items_added, lead_created, order_created, page_viewed, registration_completed, subscription_created and trial_started. app_installed and app_opened can be sent only through the Conversions API.

Supported events

A ChatGPT conversation mode that is not saved to history. Temporary Chats do not show ads, alongside the other ad-free surfaces such as paid plans and the Atlas browser.

Ads in ChatGPT

The fixed 1-day window in which a conversion after an impression without a click is still credited. View-through conversions are reported separately from click-through conversions, and a click takes precedence when both apply.

Conversion tracking

The web option in campaign platform targeting, covering ChatGPT on desktop and mobile web. It sits alongside ios_app and android_app, and omitting platform targeting defaults to all platforms.

Campaign targeting