What OpenAI actually launched

OpenAI started testing ads inside ChatGPT on 9 February 2026. On 5 May it opened a beta self-serve Ads Manager, letting advertisers sign up and buy directly, and said the rollout covered “companies of all sizes, from SMBs and startups to global brands.” Cost-per-click bidding arrived alongside the existing CPM model, with a conversion tracking pixel live and a Conversions API in development.

Digiday reported the same day that OpenAI had dropped its $50,000 minimum spend, down from the $200,000 to $250,000 floor earlier in the year. Eligible advertiser categories at that point covered household and consumer goods, local services, travel and entertainment, and digital products and education, with OpenAI saying it would widen the list “as our safeguards, review systems, and compliance infrastructure mature.”

So the barrier to entry collapsed inside three months. That's the news. What it means for your visibility is a separate question.

Where the ads appear, and where they don't

The ads sit in labelled sponsored slots, separated from the answer ChatGPT gives you. OpenAI's own line is direct: “Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you, and we keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers.”

Read that as a limit rather than a reassurance. It means the thing you're buying is adjacency. Your ad can appear next to a conversation about accountants in Manchester. It cannot make ChatGPT say your firm is the one to call.

Targeting works on conversational context. OpenAI matches ads using the subject of a conversation, past chats and previous ad interactions, rather than keywords you bid on. Advertisers get aggregate performance data, views and clicks, not the conversations themselves.

Who actually sees the ads

Ads serve to free and Go tier users only. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education subscribers see none. Under-18s are excluded from ad targeting entirely, and OpenAI keeps ads out of sensitive subjects including health, politics and mental health.

That distribution matters more than it first looks. If the people who decide whether to hire you are the kind who put a ChatGPT subscription on expenses, your ad never reaches them. They'll ask ChatGPT who to use, read the answer, and never see a sponsored slot at all.

Nobody has published a reliable figure for how many B2B buyers sit on paid tiers, so treat this as reasoning rather than data. But the direction is clear enough to plan around.

The two surfaces

There are now two ways your business can appear in a ChatGPT conversation, and they work nothing alike.

• The sponsored slot. Labelled, separated, auction-priced, served to free-tier users in eligible categories. You control it. You pay per click or per thousand impressions. It behaves like search advertising.
• The answer. Assembled from what the model retrieves and trusts about you at the moment someone asks. No auction. No account manager. You influence it only by being the kind of source a model can find, understand and quote.

Most businesses asking “how do I show up in ChatGPT?” mean the second one. They've watched enquiries arrive from people who said “ChatGPT recommended you,” and they want more of that. An ad budget doesn't produce it.

What actually decides the answer

When a model builds a recommendation, it needs something specific to draw on. A page that says you're a trusted partner delivering tailored solutions gives it nothing. There's no claim in there to retrieve, no position to attribute, no sentence worth quoting.

What gets used tends to be concrete: a named person taking a clear position, a specific method described in enough detail to be repeated, a number with a source attached, an answer to a real question phrased the way people actually ask it.

This is the part you can build. It's slower than opening an ads account and it compounds, which advertising doesn't.

When the ads are worth buying anyway

Being clear about what advertising can't do isn't the same as saying don't advertise.

If you sell consumer goods, run a local service, or sell a digital product to individuals rather than committees, you're in an eligible category, your buyers are plausibly on the free tier, and clicks are clicks. Test it with a small budget. Measure it against your other paid channels rather than against your AI visibility, because it isn't the same job.

If you sell to businesses, especially in professional services, the case is weaker on every count. Your category may not be eligible yet, and your buyers are sitting behind a subscription that removes the ads.

Frequently asked questions