ChatGPT Ads, judged on your CRM.

How do ads in ChatGPT work?

In the format OpenAI launched with, ads appeared below the end of a ChatGPT response, clearly labelled as sponsored and visually separated from the answer. One ad unit could hold one or more items, from one advertiser or several.

OpenAI announced ads on 16 January 2026 and started testing them in the US on 9 February, for logged-in adults on the Free and Go plans. At launch, Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts didn’t see ads, and OpenAI said no ads would be shown to accounts identified as under 18.

As OpenAI described it at launch, ChatGPT chooses an ad by looking at the context of the current conversation, the ad’s landing page, title and copy, the advertiser’s context hints and targeting, and, when ad personalisation is on, signals from the user’s wider ChatGPT use. Ranking combines relevance and the advertiser’s bid. Personalised ads were not available in the EEA or Switzerland at launch.

What has OpenAI promised about ads and answers?

Five principles: mission alignment, answer independence, conversation privacy, choice and control, and long-term value. In OpenAI’s words, “ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you”, conversations stay private from advertisers, and user data is never sold to them.

Advertisers receive only aggregated performance numbers such as views and clicks, and ads are not eligible to appear near personal health, mental health or politics.

How do you buy ChatGPT ads?

Three routes: OpenAI’s agency and technology partners, the self-serve Ads Manager, or the Advertiser API. The 2026 rollout went like this: Ads Manager launched in beta on 5 May, self-serve opened in Europe, India and the Middle East and North Africa at the end of August, and in September OpenAI said ads were available in more than 60 countries.

What buying looked like when self-serve launched in 2026:

• Pricing: views (CPM), clicks (CPC), or conversion-optimised delivery billed per click or impression.
• Minimum budget: $25 a day per campaign (€15 or £15 when billed in those currencies).
• Targeting: context hints instead of keywords, plus countries, regions, platforms and custom audiences of at least 25,000 matched users.
• Measurement: the OpenAI Pixel and a Conversions API, with lead, sign-up and purchase events.

Budgets, countries and bidding options change as the platform develops, so we confirm the current rules in Ads Manager before planning a test. One launch rule worth checking: new self-serve accounts could at first advertise only in their home country, until identity verification and a spend threshold were met. That matters when the advertiser and the market are in different countries.

Can fintech companies advertise in ChatGPT?

Only in part. The ad policies OpenAI published in 2026 restricted financial products and services: in the US, OpenAI could approve, case by case, advertisers of auto loans, credit cards, credit monitoring, deposit accounts, financial planning, insurance, investment services, mortgages, personal loans and payment services, and could ask for proof of licensing.

Financial tools that don’t promote financial products, such as budgeting apps or general financial software, were generally permitted. Credit repair, debt settlement, debt assistance and alternative investments were not allowed, and financial-services ads outside the US were generally prohibited. Policies change, so we check the current version for your category and countries before any budget is spent.

How do we judge ChatGPT Ads?

Goodish runs ChatGPT Ads for two clients, and we judge them the way we judge every channel: by what reaches the CRM. Views and clicks tell you an ad was shown; qualified leads and closed deals tell you whether it was worth paying for.

That matters here because relevance is not guaranteed. An independent 2026 study of more than 50,000 commercial prompts found ads on about 26% of them, and around 14% of the ads it saw were effectively unrelated to the prompt.

So every account starts the same way:

• Measurement first. OpenAI’s Pixel and Conversions API send lead events, tied to the CRM, so a lead from ChatGPT can be followed to a deal like a lead from Google.
• A time-boxed test. A fixed budget and a fixed end date, agreed before launch, with two or three ad variations.
• A decision on CRM data. Cost per qualified lead and closed deals next to Search and Meta, then a written recommendation: scale, reshape or stop. A test that says stop is a useful result.

We publish ChatGPT Ads results once we have enough of them to be meaningful.

How do you get recommended by ChatGPT without paying?

We usually start here. ChatGPT search shows pages its OAI-SearchBot crawler can reach; a site that blocks it won’t appear in ChatGPT’s search answers, while blocking GPTBot only opts out of model training. OpenAI also says it uses third-party search providers and that placement is never guaranteed.

It matters for B2B: in G2’s 2026 survey of 1,076 B2B decision-makers, 51% said they start software research in an AI chatbot more often than in Google. Referrals from ChatGPT carry utm_source=chatgpt.com, so you can see them in analytics.

What helps is unglamorous: a direct answer in the first paragraph, question-shaped headings, concrete figures, structured data, an llms.txt map, and the same company description everywhere. This page is built that way, as is the rest of this site.