Ads in ChatGPT let brands reach people while they explore options, compare products, and make decisions inside one conversation. The system reads the context of the chat, and it also uses selected signals from a person’s wider ChatGPT activity when that person turns on ads personalization. Together, these signals help ChatGPT show a message that fits what the user wants to do right now. Teams that already invest in AI search ads will recognize the shift: buyers now ask an assistant instead of scanning a results page.
Who Sees the Ads
OpenAI limits the audience on purpose. People on Plus, Pro, and any Business plan never see ads. OpenAI also hides ads from anyone who states they are under 18, and from anyone the system predicts is under 18.
What an Ad Looks Like
Each ad sits below a ChatGPT response and carries six parts:
- Advertiser name — the brand behind the message
- Favicon — the advertiser logo
- Title — the headline
- Copy — the short description
- Landing page — the destination link
- Image asset — the creative
The click sends the user straight to your site, so your destination decides the result. Send that traffic to a focused page instead of a busy homepage, and build the page around the same question the chat answered. A purpose-built landing page captures the lead while the intent stays fresh.
How ChatGPT Chooses Which Ad to Show
The ad system predicts relevance and outcomes, then picks a winner. It weighs the intent of the current conversation, the landing page, the title, the copy, the context hints an advertiser writes, and personalization signals when the user allows them.
Advertisers add those context hints at the ad group level. A hint describes the conversations, topics, or keywords where a product makes sense. Hints steer the match, but they do not work as exact-match keywords, and they never guarantee that an ad appears in a specific chat.
A relevance-weighted, second-price auction decides the final placement among all eligible ads. The design aims to create value for the advertiser and for the user at the same time.
Pricing and Bidding
ChatGPT Ads offers two buying options:
| Objective | You optimize for | You pay per |
| Reach | Impressions | 1,000 impressions (CPM) |
| Clicks | Clicks | Each valid click (CPC) |
You set a maximum bid on the ad group. Reach campaigns take a maximum CPM bid, and Clicks campaigns take a maximum CPC bid. OpenAI suggests that CPC advertisers open with $3–$5 USD per click. Ads Manager also shows bid-strength guidance, which tells you whether your number looks competitive or whether it may hold your delivery back. Treat that bid the way you treat any other auction channel, and apply the same PPC management discipline you use to protect cost per lead elsewhere.
Brand Safety
OpenAI places ads only next to chats that stay safe, appropriate, and consistent with user trust. Safeguards keep ads away from sensitive user moments and brand-unsafe environments, and the Ads Policies list those contexts in detail.
OpenAI Ads Manager Beta
Ads Manager Beta at ads.openai.com runs every part of a ChatGPT ad program. The platform is still in beta, so some capabilities remain limited today and more will arrive over time. Country availability also keeps changing as testing expands, so check the Ads Manager Availability page for the current list.
Inside the platform you can:
- Build campaigns one at a time in the guided flow, or at scale through bulk upload
- Watch impressions, clicks, and spend across campaigns, ad groups, and ads
- Handle account settings such as members, permissions, API keys, billing details, and change logs
Step 1: Set Up Your Account
Only one person — the account owner — should create the advertiser account for a business. That owner then invites everyone else. Campaigns stay paused until every setup step finishes.
Create the account. Sign in with an OpenAI account tied to your work email, or open a new one during sign-up.
Enter your details and verify. Supply your business name, website, logo, and industry. Then choose your country, currency, and time zone. Persona handles the verification questions that follow. Creating the ad account means you accept the Terms and have read the Privacy Policy. During review, OpenAI checks whether your products or services qualify under the Ads Policies. Applications move through a rolling queue, so review takes time — watch your inbox for the approval email.
Finish your account information. After access arrives, open Settings, go to Account info, and confirm that the account name and logo read exactly the way you want them to appear in the ad unit. Ads will not run until you complete this.
Add billing and payment. First, create a billing profile with your business name, invoice delivery email, and billing address, including state or region and postal code where the form asks for them. OpenAI sends invoices and finance messages to that email. Second, add a credit card and its billing address.
Invite your team. Go to Settings, then Users, then Invite, and enter each colleague’s email address.
Step 2: Build Your Campaigns
Every campaign follows the same three-level structure:
- Campaign — holds your objective, budget, dates, and targeting
- Ad group — gathers ads around one theme or intent area and carries the context hints
- Ad — the creative that appears in ChatGPT, with its title, copy, image, and landing page
Work through the guided creation flow for a single campaign, or upload a completed campaign schema template when you need volume. Choose your objective, write your hints, assemble the creative, and submit everything for review. Conversational placements reward copy that answers a question rather than shouts a slogan, so borrow the prompt-and-test workflow behind modern AI ads to draft several variants before you submit.
Step 3: Launch, Measure, and Improve
Once reviewers approve your work, check the campaign status to confirm that your ads run. If a status reads “Not serving,” hover over it to read the reason. You can fix most problems by editing the ad or campaign and resubmitting. Some ads fail on policy grounds, and others stop when account review, business verification, or a billing action becomes necessary.
Reporting in Ads Manager Beta covers impressions, clicks, spend, click-through rate, average CPC, average CPM, and conversions. Conversions appear only after you set up conversion measurement, and the measurement documentation walks through that process. You can also append static tracking parameters such as UTM tags to your landing page URLs. Those parameters survive the click, so your existing analytics tools can attribute the traffic. Compare that traffic against your Google Ads management numbers to see which channel earns the better lead at the lower price.
Read your numbers in three formats: the table view across campaigns, ad groups, and ads; charts that plot trends over your date range; and CSV downloads with daily or cumulative values. Then act on what you learn. In-line edits handle quick fixes, and bulk edit workflows handle large changes. Keep testing as data accumulates. When something breaks, the Troubleshooting Common Issues guide and the FAQ article offer the next step.
Rules to Remember Before You Submit
Lock in the permanent fields. You cannot change the country or region, the billing currency, or the time zone after you create an advertiser account. These settings drive billing, reporting, and eligibility, so review them carefully. A mistake forces you to create a fresh account with the correct information, where that option exists.
Double-check the rest. Confirm your legal business name, advertiser website, and billing details too, because some account-level fields are not self-serve editable later. Always use the details of the entity that will advertise and receive the bills.
Treat verification and review as separate stages. Finishing an identity or business verification flow does not automatically clear your account to run campaigns. Watch the account status and respond to email or in-product prompts.
Retry verification the right way. If you left the flow early, return to it from Ads Manager when it reappears and submit accurate, current documents. Duplicate or inconsistent information slows the review down.
Never file a second application while the first one waits. Duplicates do not skip the queue, and they confuse the record of which account belongs to you. OpenAI cannot expedite account or ad reviews at this time.
Running More Than One Advertiser
Each advertiser needs its own account, so agencies and multi-brand companies create one account per client or brand. Every new account also needs a different email address, because an address already used for one advertiser account cannot open another. Once the accounts exist, you can invite the same person as a member or administrator across all of them, and that person switches between the accounts they can access.
