What marketers say after six months
People have spent the last year trying to sneak into what ChatGPT says - by poisoning its sources1, gaming the data it reads2, or hiding instructions inside a prompt3. Now there is an official paid way in.
The ChatGPT Ads pilot launched six months ago, on 9 February 2026. At first the minimum ad budget was $250,000, but then the threshold was removed, and now you can test ads with as little as $5, so freelancers can advertise too4. You apply at ads.openai.com, and approval takes about two weeks.
The placement itself sits in a far more intimate space than we are used to - right between the lines of the dialogue.
Only a few countries - and no European Union
The United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were recently joined by the United Kingdom, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, and Mexico - nine markets in total5. OpenAI says it is still building the infrastructure to comply with European law: the tracking pixel that measures conversions needs a European version that can exclude certain actions from tracking.
Zalando has already joined as a European partner, and its ads can be shown when people ask ChatGPT about shopping. David Dugan, OpenAI's head of global advertising, announced it on LinkedIn6.
Update, 18 August 2026. OpenAI announced that ChatGPT ads are coming to 31 European countries, including Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Austria. The launch is expected on 24 August7.
How much a click costs
A lot, because people are reluctant to click: why click if ChatGPT has already answered the question? In real campaigns I have seen, a click costs around $10-20, and the click-through rate is around 1-2%.
The first reviews from marketers are cautious. The Canadian agency Longhouse does not sound thrilled with its campaigns:
We're seeing the potential for strong visibility, but fewer immediate conversions than we would expect.
Austin LeClear points at a deeper problem:
The audience problem is bigger than the numbers. Ads only show to free ChatGPT users - and business owners and marketers are almost all on paid plans.
Austin LeClearPerformance marketer, Grow My Ads, United StatesPublicity photograph, Grow My AdsFor business-to-business campaigns, where deal values are much higher, there is not much to do here yet.
Targeting is a prompt
There are no keywords and no demographic audiences, only context hints.
What the ad looks like
For now there is only one very basic format: one line of text, up to 48 characters, plus a small square image, 512 × 512 px. Most advertisers simply drop in their logo.
In form, it looks like early Google pay-per-click advertising. The most futuristic product of the decade is monetised like a search engine from 2002.
References
- PoisonedRAG - a handful of malicious texts planted in a model's knowledge base make it return an attacker-chosen answer, USENIX Security 2025 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.07867↩
- Carlini and colleagues, Poisoning Web-Scale Training Datasets Is Practical - buying and poisoning a slice of the data a model trains on is cheap and practical - https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.10149↩
- Pavel Gurov, Prompt injection has no fix: the architectural limit of AI security, Gurov Digital↩
- PPC Land - the pilot dates, the removal of the spend minimum, and the self-serve rollout - https://ppc.land/chatgpt-ads-go-live-in-japan-and-south-korea-and-uk-gets-self-serve/↩
- Digiday - OpenAI extends ChatGPT ads to the United Kingdom, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, and Mexico - https://digiday.com/media-buying/expand-thoughtfully-openai-offers-chatgpt-ads-to-new-markets-including-the-u-k-brazil-and-japan/↩
- Digiday - who David Dugan is, OpenAI's head of global advertising - https://digiday.com/marketing/who-is-openais-global-head-of-ads-david-dugan/↩
- OpenAI, ChatGPT Ads expands across Europe - the 18 August announcement of the rollout to 31 European countries - https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-ads-expands-across-europe/↩
- OpenAI, Ad policies - political ads are banned, and every ad passes a three-part review of advertiser, creative, and placement - https://openai.com/policies/ad-policies/