Yes, you can advertise on ChatGPT. OpenAI has shown ads to Free and Go users since February 9, 2026, and any business based in one of more than 50 countries can buy them self-serve through OpenAI Ads Manager, open since May 5, 2026, from $25 a day with no minimum spend. Below are the eight steps in order, from the eligibility check to reading your first two weeks of data. For how the ads work, who sees them and what they cost, start with the complete guide to ChatGPT ads.
Last updated September 13, 2026. Sprites is independent of OpenAI. Every number is dated to its OpenAI page, press report or thread, because the product changes monthly.
How to run ads on ChatGPT
Open an account at ads.openai.com, create a campaign, choose Views, Clicks or Conversions, set a daily budget of at least $25, describe the conversations you want with context hints, then upload a title, a line of copy and a square image. That is the ChatGPT self-serve ads path and it needs no waitlist. A ChatGPT ads agency or one of OpenAI partners can run it for you, and the managed route through the OpenAI Ads Solutions team is the third option. The sixteen steps below are that path in full.
Step 1: Check eligibility and country
Two checks. First, where you are. The legal entity that advertises and gets billed must be based in a country on OpenAI’s self-serve list, which as of September 2026 covers more than 50 countries: the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan, Korea, Brazil, Mexico, 31 European countries and several Gulf and North African markets (Ads Manager availability). Country, currency and time zone are set once at signup and never change, so pick the entity that will hold the card.
Second, what you sell. The OpenAI Ad Policies (updated September 10, 2026) prohibit adult content and dating, alcohol and tobacco, gambling, cannabis, weapons and political ads. Finance, healthcare and legal are restricted: they run only after manual approval. And no ad appears near conversations about personal health, mental health or politics.
Country not listed? Sign up anyway. OpenAI’s help center says you can register and will be notified when your region opens. Larger advertisers can contact the OpenAI Ads Solutions team through the interest form on ads.openai.com, or buy through an agency or technology partner.
Step 2: Decide what to promote
A ChatGPT ad is a card below an answer, shown when the conversation is relevant to what you sell. Nobody types “buy” into ChatGPT. They ask which fence lasts longest, how to form an LLC, which form builder connects to their CRM. The offers that work are the ones people research in a chat before buying, with a page where the visitor can finish the job alone.
OpenAI’s customer stories (September 3, 2026, so vendor-reported) show the pattern. Jotform reports a 60% lower cost per signup than paid social, with more than 10% of clicks becoming signups. LegalNature reports that about 40% of visitors from ChatGPT ads started a document flow immediately. Both are self-serve products a researcher can use in the same sitting.
The counter-examples matter too. Adweek (August 2026) reported an agency test at 0.6% CTR and zero conversions from 60 clicks at $7 each. For a first test, pick one product, one offer and a page whose next step needs no phone call.
Step 3: Create the account
Go to ads.openai.com/auth/signup and sign in with an OpenAI account tied to your work email. OpenAI lists five stages: create the account, complete onboarding and verification, complete account information, set up billing and payment, invite team members (account setup). Nothing delivers until all five are done.
Onboarding asks for business name, website, logo, industry, country, currency and time zone; the last three are permanent. Verification runs through Persona, and Symphonic Digital reports it taking days, so start before you write any ads. Agencies cannot create accounts for clients: the advertiser owns the account and invites the agency under Settings, then Users.
Billing is postpay. Add a billing profile and a card, expect a $50 or $100 authorization hold for up to seven days, and OpenAI charges each time unpaid spend reaches a threshold that starts around $25 and rises with payment history (billing and payment). The OpenAI Ads Manager walkthrough shows every screen.
Step 4: Set objective and budget
Choose the Standard campaign type unless you are a retailer with a catalog. Objectives are Views (billed CPM), Clicks (CPC) and Conversions (oCPC or oCPM); the live interface still labels Views as “Reach”. Choose Clicks for a first test. Conversions needs a standard event already flowing from your pixel, and objective, conversion event and budget type are locked after creation (edit campaigns).
The minimum daily budget is $25 in the US (15 EUR or GBP, 725 INR). A daily budget is a seven-day rolling average: spend can hit twice the figure on one day and seven times it in a week (daily budgets). Campaign-total budgets pace over the schedule, or 60 days without an end date; an agency on r/PPC found lifetime pacing poor and daily better (thread, June 24, 2026).
Bids sit on the ad group. Maximize results is the default and bids for you; Manual: Max bid caps the CPC. OpenAI’s only published guidance is to start at $3 to $5 per click in a second-price auction, and the daily budget cannot go below the ad-group bid. Targeting here is countries (the US adds state, DMA and ZIP) and optional platforms.
Step 5: Write context hints
There are no keywords. You never see the prompt and cannot bid on words in it. OpenAI chooses the ad from the current conversation, the user’s general location and language, and, when the user allows personalization, past chats, memory and earlier ad interactions. Your one lever is the context hints box on each ad group: free-text phrases describing what the product does, who it helps and when it is useful. OpenAI’s caveat: hints “are not exact-match controls, audience targeting rules, or instructions to show your ad only for specific conversations” (create ad groups).
Write scenarios, not a word list. OpenAI’s example: instead of “running shoes”, write “cushioned everyday running shoes for beginners training for their first 5K”. One product theme per ad group. The API allows 2,000 hints per group; you need a few hundred words. One r/PPC advertiser in July 2026 wrote about 1,000 words and got almost no delivery; cutting to a few hundred and dropping age and gender took the campaign to its full $25 a day (indexed in our Reddit roundup).
Test the style too: Workshop Digital found keyword-style hints beat conversational phrasing, 1.2% CTR against 0.9%. Nothing else is targetable: no demographics, interests, dayparting or frequency caps, and no prompt-level reporting.
Step 6: Build ads
An ad has six parts: advertiser name, favicon, title, copy, one image and a landing page. The specs (launch campaigns): title up to 50 characters, 16 to 24 recommended; copy up to 100 characters, 32 to 48 recommended; image PNG or JPG, square, no larger than 1200 by 1200, at a public URL. The landing page must not block OpenAI’s crawlers: OAI-AdsBot is required for review, OAI-SearchBot recommended.
Front-load the title. The first setup walkthrough on r/PPC noticed the preview truncating headlines around 35 characters (thread, May 21, 2026), so the value has to land in the first three or four words. On the image, one r/PPC advertiser in July 2026 reported headshots at about 5% CTR against logos at about 0.5%: a single account, but cheap to test. Build several distinct ads per ad group; Jotform credits a 65% CTR lift to creative iteration.
Check one toggle: “Text customization” is on by default, and its helper text says AI generates personalized and translated versions of your headlines and descriptions that may show without your review. For real ads, browse the ChatGPT ads library; the formats and targeting guide covers product feeds and carousels.
Step 7: Install the pixel before launch
Do this before the first impression, because attribution starts at the click. Every click lands with an oppref parameter, the OpenAI click reference, on the landing URL. The pixel reads it into a first-party cookie; without it, those visits show as direct traffic, which is what one r/PPC advertiser found with demo requests (thread, May 26, 2026).
In Ads Manager open Tools, then Conversions, and create a data source. You get a pixel ID and a snippet that loads oaiq.min.js from bzrcdn.openai.com; put it in the head of every page (pixel docs). Fire at least one standard event beyond page_viewed; the list runs from contents_viewed and items_added through order_created, lead_created, registration_completed and trial_started, with app_installed and app_opened for apps. Amounts go in minor units (4999 for $49.99).
For server-side checkouts add the Conversions API at bzr.openai.com and reuse the same event ID so OpenAI deduplicates. Add UTMs too; the tracking field accepts {campaign_id}, {ad_id} and {oppref}. Then expect a gap anyway: Symphonic Digital counted 53 platform clicks against 35 GA4 sessions. Conversions show in reporting 24 to 48 hours after the event.
Step 8: Read the first two weeks
Set campaign, ad groups and ads to Active. OpenAI says to expect impressions within 24 hours, to wait at least a day before flagging a delivery problem, and that reporting runs up to seven hours behind. If an ad shows “Not serving”, hover for the reason: review pending, outside the dates, bid too low, billing incomplete, budget exhausted or verification incomplete (troubleshooting). Support is [email protected].
Week one looks uneven; that is normal. The earliest public CTR report on r/PPC had 228 impressions across three ad groups, split 16 to 125, with CTRs of 0%, 1.15% and 2.4% (thread, May 15, 2026). A $34K r/PPC test describes delivery in pulses, three days on, one or two off (see our Reddit roundup).
Two rules for changes. An ad group with almost no impressions after 48 hours, budget and bid in place, has a hints problem: shorten them, cut demographic descriptions, raise the bid if manual. An ad group that serves but gets no clicks has an ad problem: rewrite the title, swap the image, leave the hints alone. By day 14, compare with the only public benchmarks: about 0.9% CTR advertiser-reported (EMARKETER, March 2026) against 6.64% for Google Search (WordStream 2026). Then feed the winning angles back into Google and Meta.
Before you spend a dollar
- Billing entity in a listed country; country, currency and time zone chosen for keeps.
- Product not prohibited; days budgeted for manual approval if it is finance, healthcare or legal.
- Persona verification complete, account name and logo filled in, billing profile and card on file, the $50 or $100 hold expected.
- Landing page allows OAI-AdsBot and OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt and any bot protection, and opens without a login.
- oaiq pixel on every page, a standard event firing on the action you care about, oppref surviving your redirects.
- One product theme per ad group, a few hundred words of scenario-style hints, three or more ads per group.
- Titles with the value in the first few words; every image a square PNG or JPG no larger than 1200 by 1200.
- Objective and budget type decided; neither can change after the campaign exists.
What to budget: three scenarios
OpenAI publishes no CPM or CTR benchmark, so any forecast rests on two assumptions: OpenAI’s recommended starting bid of $3 to $5 per click as the CPC range, and EMARKETER’s advertiser-reported CTR of 0.9%. Clicks = budget ÷ CPC. Impressions = clicks ÷ 0.009. Read the ChatGPT ads cost guide for the auction, the full currency table and the reported CPM history.
| Scenario | Monthly spend | Clicks at $3 to $5 CPC | Impressions at 0.9% CTR | Tells you |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $25 a day test | $750 (30 days at the US minimum) | 150 to 250 | 17,000 to 28,000 | Whether delivery happens for your hints, and your CTR. Too few clicks to read conversions. |
| $1K to $2K a month readable test | $1,000 to $2,000 | 200 to 667 | 22,000 to 74,000 | Enough clicks to compare two or three ad groups and see a first conversion rate, pixel permitting. |
| $10K+ a month scaled | $10,000 | 2,000 to 3,333 | 222,000 to 370,000 | Cost per conversion against Google and Meta, product feed ads if you have a catalog, the case for oCPC. |
Two adjustments. r/PPC practitioners report CPCs of $3 to $9, so at the top of that range clicks halve. And the $500 credit match on ads.openai.com, spend $500 and get $500, doubles the first month of the $25 a day scenario. A daily budget can spend twice its figure on one day, so mind the card limit.
Running ChatGPT ads next to Google and Meta
Reporting stops at clicks, spend and attributed conversions, with no prompt data and no benchmarks, so treat ChatGPT as one channel in a set. Sprites is built for that: run it, measure it, and optimize it across ChatGPT, Google and Meta from one place. Get started with a self-serve account, or book a demo.
Frequently asked questions
How to run ads on ChatGPT
Open an account at ads.openai.com, create a campaign, choose Views, Clicks or Conversions, set a daily budget of at least $25, describe the conversations you want with context hints, then upload a title, a line of copy and a square image. That is the ChatGPT self-serve ads path and it needs no waitlist. A ChatGPT ads agency or one of OpenAI partners can run it for you, and the managed route through the OpenAI Ads Solutions team is the third option.
Can you advertise on ChatGPT?
Yes. OpenAI has shown ads to Free and Go users since February 9, 2026, and any business based in one of the more than 50 self-serve countries can buy them through OpenAI Ads Manager at ads.openai.com. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu users never see ads.
How much does it cost to advertise on ChatGPT?
The minimum daily budget is $25 in the US (15 EUR or GBP, 725 INR). OpenAI recommends starting at $3 to $5 per click. There is no account minimum and no contract. r/PPC practitioners report CPCs of roughly $3 to $9; press-reported CPMs ran from $60 at launch down to $15 to $45.
Do ChatGPT ads use keywords?
No. You never see the prompt and cannot bid on words in it. OpenAI matches ads to the current conversation, general location and language, plus past chats and memory when the user allows personalization. Your input is context hints: free-text descriptions of the product and the situations where it helps, set per ad group.
What countries can I advertise on ChatGPT from?
More than 50 self-serve countries as of September 2026, including the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan, Korea, Brazil, Mexico and 31 European countries. The billed legal entity must be based in a listed country. If yours is not, register anyway and OpenAI notifies you when it opens.
Are there video ads on ChatGPT?
No. The Ads API exposes two creative types, chat_card and product_ad_template: a card with title, copy, one square image, favicon and landing page below the answer, or a product feed ad, which OpenAI may render as a carousel. There is no video unit, and Sora was reported discontinued in March 2026.
Do ChatGPT ads actually work?
Mixed, and early. OpenAI publishes case studies with a 60% lower cost per signup for Jotform and 3x ROAS for Newegg. Adweek reported an agency test at 0.6% CTR and zero conversions from 60 clicks. EMARKETER puts advertiser-reported CTR near 0.9%, far below Google Search.