OpenAI just launched ads in ChatGPT. Here's what marketers need to know.

OpenAI opened up ads.openai.com, a self-serve ads manager for ChatGPT. You can now create ads that show up inside the chat while people are exploring or comparing options. The first test was launched in the US and has since expanded to 54 countries. In LATAM, it’s already live in Mexico and Brazil.

Here's how it actually works.

Context beats keywords

The auction picks ads based on the context of the conversation, not keyword matching like search. And relevance wins the auction, not just the highest bidder. If your ad isn't a good fit for what's being discussed, spending more won't save you.

You can pay CPC or CPM

Nothing exotic here: standard pricing models, same ones you already know from other channels. There are three campaign objectives: Reach (CPM), Clicks (CPC), and Conversions. The Conversions objective optimizes delivery toward a chosen conversion event, but it's still billed per click, not per acquisition — there's no target CPA or target ROAS yet, and no bidding by value. If you're coming from Google or Meta, this is a step back in bidding sophistication, at least for now.

The big catch: no pre-click intent signal

This is the part that matters most. The signal OpenAI gives advertisers is primarily post-click. Prompt content stays private, so there's no equivalent to the intent signal you get from a search query before someone clicks. In search, you know a lot about what someone wants before they ever touch your ad. Here, you don't — you only learn once they've engaged.

That changes how you'll need to think about targeting, measurement, and optimization on this channel. The playbooks that work for search won't transfer cleanly.

Not every ChatGPT user sees these ads

Worth knowing before you get excited about reach: ads only show to logged-in adult users on the Free and Go tiers. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education users don't see them at all. So the addressable audience is narrower than "all of ChatGPT" — keep that in mind when you're sizing this channel for a client.

Why this is worth tracking now

ChatGPT ads are new and we don't yet know how they'll perform at scale or what conversion quality looks like. But conversational AI is becoming a real place where people research and compare products — and ad platforms are following the traffic.

Add to that: we've already had conversations with clients asking whether this is something we could help them optimize. It's reasonable to expect more of those conversations soon, especially as OpenAI expands beyond Mexico and Brazil.

Our take: keep this channel on your radar, and start thinking now about how you'd approach measurement without a pre-click intent signal. The teams that figure this out early will have an edge once it opens up more broadly.

If you want to test it, a few things worth setting up first

Treat this as a learning test, not a channel to scale yet.

• Start with CPC, not CPM. Without a pre-click intent signal, you want a signal tied to actual engagement, not just impressions.
• Keep budgets small and time-boxed. This is about learning how the channel behaves, not scaling spend.
• Set up your own conversion pixel or Conversions API from day one. Don't rely solely on OpenAI's aggregated reporting.
• Expect more hands-on management than Google or Meta. Automated bidding is still rolling out, so manual bid-setting and monitoring will matter more early on.
• Size your expectations to the audience. Ads only reach logged-in users on ChatGPT's Free and Go tiers, not the full ChatGPT user base.

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