The Complete Guide to ChatGPT Ads (2026)

1. What ChatGPT Ads Are

ChatGPT Ads — often called OpenAI Ads — are clearly labeled sponsored placements that render belowChatGPT's response, never inside it. The unit is a self-contained card: advertiser name, favicon or logo, a headline, short copy, a link to the landing page, and an image. The ad is visually separated from the answer and marked as sponsored, so a reader can tell editorial text from paid placement at a glance source.

An advertiser never writes or shapes the answer itself. You supply the ad creative and the signals that describe where it fits; ChatGPT produces the response independently, and the sponsored card sits underneath it as its own unit.

Who actually sees an ad

Delivery is narrow by design. Ads go only to logged-in users on the Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education subscribers do not see them, and accounts OpenAI predicts to be under 18 are excluded. There are no ads in Temporary Chats and no ads in the ChatGPT Atlas browser source. In other words, the addressable audience is the free, adult, signed-in population of ChatGPT — not every user of the product.

How large that audience is

OpenAI's ads platform cites 1.2B weekly users for ChatGPT source. That figure is OpenAI's own published number and is the reach context for every budget discussion below — it describes weekly users of ChatGPT, while the ad-eligible subset is smaller after the plan, age and surface exclusions above.

2. Who Can Advertise

Self-serve Ads Manager is available in 63 countries, and the rule that trips most applicants is an entity rule, not a creative one: the legal entity that advertises and is billed must be based in one of the listed countries source. A business incorporated outside the list cannot self-serve simply because its customers sit inside it.

Regional grouping: Ads Manager availability. No countries are currently marked as coming soon.

The full country list is kept on its own page rather than repeated here: see all 63 self-serve markets. Two practical notes: advertisers in some newer European markets currently start through the OpenAI Ads Solutions team, an agency or a tech partner instead of self-serve, and market availability for your account should be confirmed before you build a campaign, not after source.

3. Formats & Creative

The core unit is one sponsored card with a headline, body copy and an image. The specs are tight by design — ads sit inside a conversation, so creative is short and vertical:

Specs: bulk upload campaign schema checklist.

Creative types through the API

The Ads API exposes two creative types: chat_card for a single sponsored card, and product_ad_template for ads built from a product feed source. Feed-based creative is how catalogs scale beyond hand-written single ads.

AI creative tools inside Ads Manager

Ads Manager includes AI tools that suggest copy and imagery from your landing page and campaign objective — the advertiser reviews everything before use — plus an opt-in AI text customization that adapts headlines and descriptions to conversation context and auto-translates them into the user's language source. A separate “suggested ad drafts” feature prefills a draft from your existing website metadata; OpenAI states it does not generate new copy or imagery with AI source.

Newer formats in test

Two formats are worth knowing because they change the shape of the inventory:

• Image-generation placement (announced October 5, 2026)— a visual ad format being tested inside ChatGPT's image generation for Free and Go plans, US only source.
• Sponsored Agents — an ad that opens a business-sponsored AI agent. It is in a limited alpha for selected advertisers only, and OpenAI is not accepting early-access requests source.

4. Targeting

ChatGPT Ads targeting has four independent layers — geography, platform, audiences and context hints. All are documented in OpenAI's campaign targeting guide source.

Geography

Locations are specified with ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes or location IDs, and an inclusion or exclusion list holds up to 2,500 IDs. Exclusions always beat inclusions. A downloadable geo catalog CSV maps the available IDs at ads.openai.com/assets/openai-geotargets.csv. OpenAI explicitly warns that a code's ISO validity does not mean it is available for advertising in your account — market availability (section 2) and geo validity are separate checks.

Platform

Three platform values exist: ios_app (ChatGPT iOS app), android_app (Android app) and web (ChatGPT web, including desktop and mobile web). Omitting platform targeting defaults to all platforms source.

Custom audiences

Audiences are built from email addresses, phone numbers, 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, and inline member requests at 16 MiB source.

Context hints — not keywords

Each ad group takes up to 2,000 context hints. They are descriptive signals about your product and use cases that help match the ad to relevant conversations and inform creative and landing-page relevance. OpenAI is explicit about what they are not: they are not exact-match keywords, and they do not replace geographic, platform or audience targeting source. Treat them as intent descriptions, not a keyword buy — deeper coverage is on the context hints guide and the targeting page.

5. Budgets & Bidding

Billing models

Ads are never billed per conversion. Billing and payment · bidding and budgets.

Bids

For click campaigns, OpenAI documents a recommended starting maximum CPC bid of $3–$5 USD per click. For Reach campaigns, the maximum CPM bid is set at the ad-group level source. Starting at the top of the recommended band and letting the auction settle is the documented pattern; there is no published ceiling.

The auction

The auction is relevance-weighted and second-price — eligibility and relevance factor into who wins, and pricing follows second-price logic rather than first-price source. Practically, a max bid is a ceiling: you pay according to the auction outcome, not automatically your full bid.

Minimums and the 7-day average rule

Minimum daily budgets vary by market and currency; the documented standard minimum for US dollar accounts is $25/day in the US source. The daily budget is 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 source. Plan cash flow on the weekly number, not the daily one.

Daily budget:  $25
Single day:    up to $50   (2×)
7-day window:  up to $175  (7×)

Billing mechanics and API budgets

Billing is postpay. Card accounts charge at assigned payment thresholds — the documented US progression is $25 → $50 → $100 → $200 — plus a month-end balance charge, and thresholds cannot be set manually source. Through the API, budgets and bids are expressed in micros: 1,000,000 micros equal one account-currency unit. Daily minimums depend on the account currency, and a too-low value returns an error that states the required amount source.

6. Measurement

Measurement runs on two channels: the browser-side measurement pixel and the server-side Conversions API. Both feed the same reporting in Ads Manager.

The pixel

The SDK is served from https://bzrcdn.openai.com/sdk/oaiq.min.js and exposes the global oaiq queue. Consent is set before initialization with oaiq("consent", true|false), the pixel is initialized with oaiq("init", { pixelId }), and events are sent with oaiq("measure", event, data, { event_id, custom_event_name, opt_out }) source.

The 13 standard events

app_installed      appointment_scheduled   checkout_started
app_opened         contents_viewed         custom
items_added        lead_created            order_created
page_viewed        registration_completed  subscription_created
trial_started

app_installed and app_opened are Conversions-API-only; the rest can come from the pixel source. Custom event 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.

Money values in minor units

Whenever an amount is sent it must be an integer in the currency's ISO 4217 minor unit, and currency is required alongside it: 2599 = $25.99 and 8900 = JPY 8,900 source.

Deduplication

The same conversion sent from browser and server is matched on pixel ID + event name + event_id, and the first event wins source. Generate one event_id per conversion (an order ID works) and reuse it exactly on both channels.

Attribution windows

Click-through attribution uses the click window you configure (OpenAI's docs illustrate a 30-day example). View-through attribution is a fixed 1-day window, reported separately, and when both apply the click takes precedence source. Two first-party cookies support the chain: __oppref lasts 30 days and __obref lasts 365 days source.

Conversions API

Server events post to https://bzr.openai.com/v1/events?pid=<PIXEL_ID> authenticated with 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 source. For WordPress, the free Ridoway Pixel plugin handles pixel install, server events and event_id deduplication.

7. Policies & Brand Safety

OpenAI's ad policies were last updated September 10, 2026, with the published changelog at version v1.6 (September 2026) source. Launch categories are consumer verticals: household and lifestyle, local services, travel and experiences, and digital products and education. Financial, healthcare and legal advertisers are handled case by case, currently US only source.

Brand safety is enforced with placement guardrails and automated review with human oversight, a Negative Phrases control for qualifying advertisers, and brand-suitability pilots with DoubleVerify and IAS source. Before writing creative, run the requirements checklist on the requirements page — most rejections are category or landing-page mismatches, not formatting errors.

8. Privacy

Advertisers receive aggregate reporting only — views and clicks — and cannot access personal data. OpenAI states that it never sells user data to advertisers source. Ad data is deleted on request and retained for up to 30 days, and ad personalization is off by default in the EEA and Switzerland source.

Two consequences follow for advertisers. First, optimization runs on campaign-level performance, not on identifiable individuals, so the quality of your aggregate conversion signal (pixel + Conversions API) matters more than any audience-level detail. Second, the AI creative features are review-first: suggested copy and imagery are shown to you before they run, and the conversation-aware text customization is opt-in source. On your side of the line, disclose what you collect and wire consent where your jurisdiction requires it before enabling measurement.

9. How to Start

1. 1Confirm your legal entity is based in a self-serve market. All 63 markets
2. 2Check that your business category and landing page pass the policy and eligibility rules. Eligibility
3. 3Read the full pre-launch requirements checklist before you build anything. Requirements
4. 4Plan budget and bids against the documented minimums and the 7-day average rule. Cost guide
5. 5Build targeting: geo codes or location IDs, platform, audiences, then context hints. Targeting
6. 6Create the campaign end to end — account, structure, creative and review. Setup guide
7. 7Install measurement before spending: pixel, then Conversions API for money events. Conversion tracking
8. 8On WordPress, let the Ridoway Pixel plugin handle install, server events and dedupe. Ridoway Pixel

10. Frequently Asked Questions

11. Sources

Every figure in this guide comes from one of the following, verified October 8, 2026. Third-party reports are marked as such.

1. 1.OpenAI Help — Ads Manager availability (63 self-serve markets, entity rule) ↗
2. 2.OpenAI Help — Ads in ChatGPT (placement, who sees ads, ad unit) ↗
3. 3.OpenAI Help — Ads in ChatGPT: the basics ↗
4. 4.OpenAI Ads — ads.openai.com (1.2B weekly users) ↗
5. 5.OpenAI Help — Bulk upload campaign schema checklist (headline, body and image specs) ↗
6. 6.OpenAI Developers — Campaign targeting (geo, platform, audiences, context hints) ↗
7. 7.OpenAI Developers — Ads API reference (creative types) ↗
8. 8.OpenAI — New ChatGPT ads format and measurement (October 5, 2026) ↗
9. 9.OpenAI Help — Sponsored Agents in ChatGPT Ads (limited alpha) ↗
10. 10.OpenAI Help — Billing and payment (postpay, thresholds, minimums) ↗
11. 11.OpenAI Help — Daily budgets (7-day average rule) ↗
12. 12.OpenAI Developers — Bidding and budgets (micros, bids) ↗
13. 13.OpenAI — Geo target catalog CSV ↗
14. 14.OpenAI Developers — Measurement pixel (oaiq, init, measure) ↗
15. 15.OpenAI Developers — Supported events (13 standard events, minor units) ↗
16. 16.OpenAI Developers — Conversion tracking (dedupe, attribution, Conversions API) ↗
17. 17.OpenAI — Ad policies (Updated September 10, 2026) ↗
18. 18.OpenAI — Our approach to advertising and expanding access (January 16, 2026) ↗
19. 19.OpenAI — Reimagining advertising with AI (September 16, 2026) ↗
20. 20.OpenAI Help — Creating and editing ads (AI creative tools, suggested ad drafts) ↗
21. 21.Adweek (third party, January 31, 2026) — $200,000 minimum commitment, $60 CPM private beta report ↗
22. 22.Adweek (third party, August 31, 2026) — reported advertising revenue run-rate ↗