ChatGPT Ads is OpenAI's advertising platform: sponsored ads that appear at the bottom of ChatGPT's answers when the conversation touches on a relevant product or service. OpenAI announced them on 16 January 2026 and began testing them in the United States in February. The UK was the first European market to go live, on 6 June 2026, ahead of the 31 European countries OpenAI added from 18 August.
Interest in the UK has shot up: "chatgpt ads" went from 390 Google searches in September 2025 to 5,400 in August 2026, averaging 3,600 a month, with an estimated CPC of £13.09 (DataForSEO, Google UK, September 2026; CPC converted from US dollars at the Bank of England rate of 8 October 2026, $1.3226 = £1). People searching for it want to know two things: whether it's worth testing and how to buy it.
What ChatGPT Ads is
In its January 2026 announcement OpenAI set out the main rules:
- ads appear at the bottom of the answer, when there's a sponsored product relevant to the conversation;
- they're shown to adult users with a registered account on the Free and Go plans. The Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu plans stay ad-free;
- "Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you": the answer is the same with or without an ad;
- no ads for anyone under 18 or who appears likely to be, and no ads next to health, mental health or political topics;
- conversations stay private and data isn't sold. Users can switch off personalisation.
When the test launched on 9 February 2026, OpenAI added two details: ads are "clearly labeled as sponsored" and visually separate from the answer, and advertisers only get aggregate data, meaning views and clicks. A Free user can choose not to see ads in exchange for fewer messages a day.
Formats
For now there's one format: an ad labelled as sponsored, below the answer. There are no ads inside the generated text and no video formats. Anyone selling "placements inside ChatGPT's answers" is selling something else, usually GEO work that's been misrepresented.
How to buy it and what it costs
The milestones, in order:
| Date | What changed | Source |
|---|---|---|
| February 2026 | Closed beta in the US, a handful of large brands | OpenAI |
| January-April 2026 | Reported minimum spend of $200,000, later cut to $50,000 | Adweek, PPC Land |
| 5 May 2026 | CPC bidding and the self-serve Ads Manager arrive in beta for US businesses, with a Conversions API and pixel | OpenAI |
| 6 June 2026 | Ads go live in the UK, the first European market, sold through OpenAI's team and partners only | PPC Land |
| 22 June 2026 | The Ads Manager beta opens to UK businesses, with no minimum spend | PPC Land, OpenAI Help Center |
There are four ways to buy: through OpenAI's Ads Solutions team, through partner agencies (Dentsu, Omnicom, Publicis and WPP), through technology partners such as Adobe and Criteo, or directly in Ads Manager.
OpenAI hasn't published a rate card. The figures going round come from the trade press and from the US phase:
- a fixed CPM of $60 during the pilot, falling to around $25 in some cases (sources: Digiday and PPC Land);
- CPCs of $3 to $5 once click-based bidding arrived (Search Engine Land, April 2026);
- for the UK no sterling prices and no official minimum spend have been published.
Treat these as orders of magnitude, not prices. With the auction open to what OpenAI calls "tens of thousands of marketers", costs will settle by sector, as they did on Google Ads.
How it differs from Google Ads
| Google Ads (Search Network) | ChatGPT Ads | |
|---|---|---|
| What triggers the ad | A keyword someone types | The content of the conversation |
| Where it appears | Above and below the results | At the bottom of the answer |
| Who sees it | All users | Adults on the Free and Go plans only |
| Pricing models | CPC, CPA, ROAS and others | CPM and CPC, with conversion optimisation |
| Data for the advertiser | Search terms, audiences, conversions | Aggregate views and clicks, conversions via the pixel |
| Maturity | More than twenty years of history | A few months in the UK |
The biggest difference is that on Google the advertiser chooses the keywords, while on ChatGPT the system decides when an ad is relevant to the conversation. You lose control over the individual query and gain a presence at moments when the user is thinking through a purchase.
There's no official performance data yet. The only figure going round, from a February 2026 Criteo analysis reported by PPC Land, says that visitors arriving from LLMs convert about 1.5 times better than other referral channels. That's about AI traffic in general, not about the ads.
Ads and organic visibility are two different things
Ads don't influence the answers, OpenAI says. So a company can pay to appear below an answer that names its competitors and not itself. To appear inside the answer you need to work on content and sources, in other words on organic visibility in AI answers. The two add up; one doesn't replace the other. We explain how to measure the organic side in our guide to AI visibility.
There's also an issue for anyone already running Google Ads. OpenAI has a dedicated bot, OAI-AdsBot, that checks ad landing pages and, according to the official documentation, doesn't follow robots.txt. If a firewall blocks unknown bots, check that it isn't blocking this one too. The full list is in our article on AI crawlers.
How to get ready
- Check whether your audience is on ChatGPT. The AI Assistant channel in GA4 shows how many visits already come from ChatGPT. If there are none, an ad test starts in the dark.
- Start with a test budget kept separate from your Google Ads budget, so you can compare cost per lead and lead quality.
- Build landing pages that answer the question, not just the offer. Someone arriving from a conversation has already read an explanation and wants confirmation: prices, examples, timescales.
- Install the pixel and the Conversions API before you spend. Without them, your data stops at clicks.
- Don't move budget away from Google Ads until the numbers are in. In the UK Google still handles 91% of searches, according to StatCounter for September 2026.
If you'd like to compare the two channels on your own numbers, we start from your existing Google Ads account: you'll find our approach on the Google Ads service page.
Further reading: Ads in AI Overviews: what Google Ads is really running in the UK.
FAQs
Yes. Ads went live in the UK on 6 June 2026, the first European market, and the self-serve Ads Manager beta opened to UK businesses later that month. OpenAI's Help Center lists the United Kingdom among the countries where Ads Manager is available.
Adult users with a registered account on the Free and Go plans. The Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu plans don't show ads, and ads don't appear next to health, mental health or political topics.
According to OpenAI, no: ads appear at the bottom of the answer, labelled as sponsored, and don't influence the generated content.
OpenAI doesn't publish a rate card. During the US phase the trade press reported CPMs of $25 to $60 and CPCs of $3 to $5. In the UK you buy on CPM or CPC through Ads Manager, with no official minimum spend and no published sterling prices.
