How to advertise on ChatGPT in 2026: what it costs and who gets in

You advertise on ChatGPT through OpenAI's Ads Manager at ads.openai.com. As of September 30, 2026, a verified business in any of more than 60 countries can sign up, set a daily budget from $25 and bid for clicks or impressions. The ads sit below ChatGPT's answers and reach only logged-in adults on the Free and Go plans.

The door opened fast. "We're at the beginning of a new chapter for advertising, with AI creating new ways for businesses and people to connect," Dave Dugan, OpenAI's VP and head of global ads solutions, said on September 23. Three weeks earlier OpenAI had announced a $1 billion annualized ad run rate, reached in under 200 days. One category still finds the door mostly shut. OpenAI's help center lists cryptocurrency as restricted to select approved advertisers in the US and not allowed anywhere else.

Seven numbers that decide whether ChatGPT ads fit

From a six-figure pilot to $25 a day in 12 weeks

ChatGPT ads started as a closed club. OpenAI began testing on February 9, 2026, in the US, with a small group of advertisers. Trade press reported a $60 CPM and a minimum commitment of $200,000 to $250,000, per The Keyword, which cited Digiday. Then the walls came down in three steps.

The price of attention fell alongside the entry fee. Digiday reported on April 17 that CPMs had slid from the $60 launch price to between $25 and $45. Jai Amin, chief of media activation at Jellyfish, put his agency's average near $45. "It feels like everything is coming down, preparing for a wider auction accessibility to fit [a] global rollout," said Ashley Fletcher, CMO of Adthena. Canada, Australia and New Zealand joined in the spring, then the UK, Japan, South Korea, Brazil and Mexico, per OpenAI.

Where ChatGPT ads appear and who sees them

An ad shows up under an answer, labeled as sponsored and set apart from the response. Each one carries the advertiser's name, a favicon or logo, a title, a short description, an image and a landing page, per OpenAI's help page. Third-party spec sheets, such as Accuracast's from July 2026, give 50 characters for the headline and 100 for the description. The OpenAI help pages we read list no character limits.

The audience is narrower than ChatGPT's billion weekly users. Go is the only paid plan that carries ads, and OpenAI screens out minors and sensitive conversations.

OpenAI says ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives, and advertisers see only aggregate numbers, never the chats. Matching runs on the context of the current conversation, plus signals from the user's wider ChatGPT history when personalization is switched on. Ads serve on the Android and iOS apps, the mobile web and desktop.

The inventory is filling up. Similarweb found sponsored units in 26% of US desktop chats in June 2026, up from 14% in May, with a 0.50% click-through rate. Adthena counted 7,378 distinct advertisers in the week of July 13 to 20, and 60.1% of them were in the US. Both figures come from PPC Land's roundup of September 24. OpenAI itself says only that "tens of thousands" of businesses advertise.

Who can advertise on ChatGPT

Three gates stand between a business and its first impression: the country the business sits in, the identity check and the category it sells in. The first two are routine. The third rules whole industries out.

Country and billing

Ads Manager is open only to businesses in supported countries, which OpenAI lists on an availability page linked from its Ads in ChatGPT help page. PPC Land counted 63 of them after the September 23 expansion. You pay by credit card. Your billing currency sets the daily minimum, per the campaign guide: $25 in US dollars, €15 in euros, £15 in sterling, ₹725 in rupees or ¥2,500 in yen.

Identity

Sign-up asks for your business details and runs an identity check. OpenAI's troubleshooting page says reviews can take up to seven business days and fail when OpenAI "could not verify the accuracy of your business identity, ownership, or affiliations."

Category

OpenAI's ad policy bans some categories outright and restricts others to approved advertisers, with most regulated ones closed outside the US. The help center's eligibility tables and the ad policy spell it out row by row.

Two more rules catch people out. The policy says a business whose "primary business model or offerings" sits in a restricted category may be refused even if the product in the ad is harmless. And OpenAI protects its own turf: since a September 2026 update, ads for standalone image and voice generators no longer get approved, which took Adobe Firefly off ChatGPT.

How to advertise on ChatGPT, step by step

Once the three gates are cleared, a first campaign takes six decisions. Most of them look like Google Ads. Targeting does not.

1. Open an account at ads.openai.com

Go to Ads Manager, enter the business details, pick a billing currency and add a card. Start the identity check early, because a week-long review is the slowest step in the whole process.

2. Install the pixel or the Conversions API first

OpenAI added a pixel and a server-side Conversions API in May, and they feed the Conversions objective. Put UTM parameters on every landing URL as well, so the traffic shows up in your own GA4. Our GA4 measurement guide covers the setup. Impressions and clicks refresh about every 15 minutes, while spend can lag seven to eight hours.

3. Pick an objective and a budget

The campaign guide offers three objectives. Views bills per 1,000 impressions. Clicks bills per click. Conversions optimizes toward a pixel event and bills per valid click or per 1,000 impressions, never per conversion. The daily budget is an average over seven days, so a single day can overspend it.

4. Choose where the ads run

Pick countries, and regions within them where OpenAI supports it, then the surfaces: Android app, Android web, iOS app, iOS web and desktop web. Custom audiences work too, but an inclusion list needs at least 25,000 matched users. Exclusion lists can be smaller.

5. Write context hints, not keywords

Ad groups take context hints: plain sentences that describe the conversations where your product belongs. OpenAI says they "are not exact-match keywords and do not guarantee delivery." A budgeting app might write "a freelancer asking how to set aside money for quarterly taxes." Write several, each a different situation, and keep the ad copy as plain as the hint.

6. Bid low and fence the spend

The auction is a relevance-weighted second-price auction, so a strong match can win without the top bid. OpenAI suggests starting at $3 to $5 per click. Run a separate test budget, check the traffic in GA4 weekly and look at who actually arrived. In a B2B test reported by Search Engine Journal, Floyd Blaikie found that only five of 146 organizations reaching the site matched the ideal customer profile.

What ChatGPT ads cost in practice

OpenAI publishes no benchmarks. Every figure below comes from one advertiser or one agency spending its own money, most of them over days, not months. Treat them as directional.

The widest data set is Synter's. Joel Horwitz, its founder and CEO, spent $4,428.84 across five markets from June 2 to 10 and bought 448 clicks at a blended $9.89. The spread by country was wide: $5.10 in the UK, $10.62 in the US and $22.89 in New Zealand. Click-through was 0.35%.

Other tests landed cheaper. Common Thread Collective reported a $4.41 CPC and a 0.94% click-through rate on one ecommerce account, with ROAS between 3.3x and 6.8x, per Search Engine Journal. Opascope reported about $1.72 per click on a client account that spent roughly $60,000 over 15 days, with a 2.35% conversion rate and a 1.49x ROAS. For comparison, the median US Google Search click cost $5.42 across 13,474 campaigns in WordStream's 2026 benchmarks.

Hüseyin Ograk, head of PPC at Hostinger, which spent nearly $70,000, first reported that CPCs weren't higher than Google Search and that the campaigns had generated purchases. His concerns were click-through and traffic quality, per SEJ.

Impressions are where ChatGPT is expensive. Synter measured a $34.16 CPM. Hostinger reported one above $65. Triple Whale's averages across tens of thousands of ecommerce brands were $15.35 for Google Ads and $15.06 for Meta over the year to July 2026. So a ChatGPT impression runs roughly two to four times the price of a Google or Meta one. The case for paying it is intent: the user is mid-question on a topic you chose, not scrolling a feed.

OpenAI's own evidence is thin but positive. Its August 31 post cites an ecommerce advertiser that got 3x return on ad spend over 28 days. A technology partner saw 80% of ad-driven traffic come from new customers. Neither is named.

Crypto projects can't buy ChatGPT ads, with one narrow exception

The rule is short. In OpenAI's eligibility tables, cryptocurrency is "Restricted to Select Approved Advertisers" in the US and "Not allowed" in every other country. The same page says OpenAI is "not accepting applications for approval in certain policy categories" at the moment. The ad policy adds that financial advertisers may need proof of licensure. Financial services ads outside the US are "generally prohibited," and alternative investments such as bullion are banned outright.

Read together, that leaves four kinds of crypto business in four different places.

The first row is the closest anyone gets today. The third-party ChatGPT Ad Library logged a Robinhood investing ad served on the crypto prompt "crypto portfolio tracker that auto syncs binance coinbase and metamask." The ad itself sold investing, not crypto. Robinhood is a US broker that offers crypto trading alongside stocks. Financial brands are spending more. Sensor Tower found their share of US ChatGPT ad spend rose from 2% in April to 13% in August, per PPC Land. Crypto-native exchanges such as Coinbase and Kraken are not among the top advertisers the library lists for the category.

ChatGPT is the narrowest of the big platforms for crypto. Google certifies licensed exchanges and wallets in named countries, as our Google Ads crypto policy breakdown shows. Meta and X set their own license rules, covered in our Facebook crypto ads and X crypto ads guides. OpenAI has no certification program at all, only case-by-case US approval, and its help center says some approval categories are not taking applications.

Projects in the second and third rows buy placements on crypto publications instead, directly or through crypto ad networks. We run one. PraxAds sells banner and native placements on crypto sites we review by hand and takes deposits in USDT or USDC. Every click carries UTM parameters, so you can check it in your own GA4.

The free route is getting ChatGPT to name you

The answer itself is not for sale. If OpenAI keeps its promise that ads don't shape answers, the only way into the text is to be the brand ChatGPT already trusts. For most crypto projects that is the only ChatGPT channel open.

The field is still open. Semrush tracked 1,094 US categories in ChatGPT from January to June 2026, per Search Engine Land. Only 15.2% had a clear brand owner, and 53.7% had no dominant brand at all. Only 21% of the most-cited domains were also the most-mentioned brands. "Traditional SEO metrics aren't enough to explain who owns a topic," said Kevin Indig, founder of Growth Memo.

Mentions matter more than links. An Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands, published in December 2025, found branded web mentions correlated with ChatGPT visibility at 0.664. Across the three AI assistants it studied, YouTube mentions correlated highest, at about 0.737, and backlinks weakly, at about 0.19 to 0.27.

That points to a short routine. Publish pages that answer one question with numbers, dates and a table, because those are the passages an assistant can lift whole. Get named on the sites and channels people in your category already read. Then ask ChatGPT about your category once a month and write down who it names. The list moves, and Semrush found clear owners kept first place in 90.4% of month-to-month comparisons, so early matters.

Where this leaves your budget

If you sell an allowed product in a supported country and already have a conversion event you trust, ChatGPT ads are worth a fenced test. Start near the $25 daily minimum, bid in the $3 to $5 band, write five context hints and read the traffic in GA4 before raising anything. Reported clicks ranged from well below to well above Google's median. Impressions cost two to four times more, so buy clicks. Google's Gemini app, by contrast, still sells no ads at all, as our Gemini advertising guide explains.

If you sell crypto outside the US, the channel is closed and no agency can open it for you. Anyone selling a guaranteed ChatGPT placement for a token is selling something OpenAI does not offer. OpenAI's ad policy is already on version 1.6. We'll update this page when the crypto row changes.

Frequently asked questions

How do I advertise on ChatGPT?

Sign up for OpenAI's Ads Manager at ads.openai.com with a business in a supported country, pass the identity check, add a credit card and create a campaign. You choose an objective (views, clicks or conversions), a daily budget, countries and devices, then write context hints that describe the conversations where your ad should appear.

How much do ChatGPT ads cost?

OpenAI suggests a starting bid of $3 to $5 per click. Reported averages from single advertisers ranged from about $1.72 to $22.89 per click in 2026, with a blended $9.89 in Synter's five-market test. CPMs launched at $60 and advertisers have since reported between about $34 and $65, two to four times Google and Meta averages.

Is there a minimum spend for ChatGPT ads?

No commitment since May 5, 2026, but each campaign needs a minimum daily budget in your billing currency: $25 in US dollars, €15 in euros, £15 in sterling. At launch in February 2026, advertisers reportedly committed $200,000 to $250,000, cut to $50,000 on April 13.

Which countries can run ChatGPT ads?

More than 60 as of September 2026. The list covers the US, Canada, the UK and the rest of Europe, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Mexico and much of the Middle East and North Africa. Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan joined on September 23. OpenAI keeps the current list on its Ads Manager availability page.

Who sees ads in ChatGPT?

Logged-in adults on the Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts see no ads, and neither do accounts identified as belonging to users under 18. Ads also stay away from conversations about personal health, mental health and politics.

Can crypto companies advertise on ChatGPT?

Only approved advertisers in the US. OpenAI's help center lists cryptocurrency as restricted to select approved advertisers in the US and not allowed in any other country, and says some approval categories are not taking applications. Tokens, presales, DeFi protocols and exchanges licensed outside the US have no route in and usually buy placements on crypto publications instead.

Do ChatGPT ads change ChatGPT's answers?

OpenAI says no. Ads are labeled as sponsored, shown separately below the response, and do not influence what ChatGPT answers. Advertisers receive aggregate reporting such as views and clicks, not conversation content.