How ads in ChatGPT work: the sponsored slot, the auction, and the answer above it

Ads have been part of ChatGPT since 9 February 2026, first in the United States, and since late August 2026 across thirty one European markets. They serve signed-in people on the Free and Go plans. This guide describes the mechanism as OpenAI documents it: where the ad sits, how one is chosen, what it costs, what it is not allowed to touch, and what the person on the other side of the screen can turn off. Then it reports what advertisers have published about running it. Facts verified on 8 September 2026 against the OpenAI help centre and the ad policies.

Where ads run, and who sees them

The pilot opened in the United States on 9 February 2026. Eight further markets followed over the next six months, then OpenAI opened thirty one European countries on 18 August 2026, among them Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Austria. It is the widest expansion so far, and it brings to forty the number of markets where an ad can be shown.

The advertiser side follows a different map, and the two are worth keeping apart. To open a self-serve account, the legal entity that advertises and is billed has to be based in an open country: there were fifty two of them on 7 September 2026 on the list OpenAI keeps, covering North America, most of Europe, Brazil, Mexico, India, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand and eleven markets across the Middle East and North Africa. Self-serve access for the European markets opened on 31 August 2026; before that date the way in was the OpenAI sales team, an agency or a technology partner.

An ad can appear below the end of a response. It is labelled as sponsored and visually separated from the response itself. It serves accounts on the Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts do not see ads, and neither do accounts identified as belonging to people under 18, based on account age information and age prediction. Temporary Chats carry none, and during this test neither does the ChatGPT Atlas browser. That eligibility rule decides more than it looks like it does, and the last section comes back to it.

The ad unit

An ad carries six elements: the advertiser name, a favicon, a title, a line of copy, a landing page and an image. One response may carry one or more units, which can feature several items or several advertisers, and length of conversation is taken into account.

How one ad is chosen rather than another

Selection weighs the context and intent of the current conversation, the ad's own landing page, title and copy, the context hints and targeting the advertiser sets, and, when ads personalisation is on, signals from that person's broader ChatGPT experience.

That last branch does not apply everywhere. Personalisation is not open in the European Economic Area or Switzerland at launch: in those markets an ad is chosen on the current thread and on what the advertiser set, and on nothing else.

Context hints are written at ad group level. They describe the conversations, topics or situations where a product may be relevant, and OpenAI is explicit that they are not exact match keywords and guarantee delivery in no particular conversation. A buyer arriving from search advertising meets the difference in the first hour: there is no term to bid on, and the reporting does not return the prompts that produced a click.

The ranking, the objectives and the price

Among eligible ads, ranking runs a relevance weighted second price auction. Buying happens by objective, and there are three:

• CPM, the cost per thousand impressions, for reach and awareness;
• CPC, the cost per valid click, for traffic;
• oCPC, the conversion optimised cost per click, which aims at a tracked action after the click and still bills per valid click, never per conversion.

The maximum bid is set at ad group level, and Ads Manager can indicate whether a bid is likely to be competitive. OpenAI suggests opening a click campaign between three and five dollars per click. Budgets are set as a campaign total or per day, with a daily minimum that depends on the billing currency: fifteen euros, fifteen pounds, twenty five dollars.

A campaign also carries its targeting: the countries it aims at, and inside the United States the state, designated market area or postal code; the surfaces, between the iOS app, the Android app and the web; and custom audiences to include or exclude.

What the purchase does not touch

Ads run on systems separate from the chat model, and an advertiser has no ability to shape, rank or alter a response. Seeing an ad does not mean the product is endorsed or recommended, and OpenAI states that separation as a principle rather than a setting.

That boundary is the reason this guide exists. Two competitions run one above the other on the same screen, and they are won in two different ways. The card below is bought at auction. The sources cited inside the answer are not for sale: they are what the engine retrieved and chose to credit. We measure that second competition continuously, and on ChatGPT it is narrow. The engine cites at least one source in roughly three quarters of its answers, and credits about six distinct domains when it does cite, two figures we publish under the names AI Coverage and AI Density and whose spread across engines we measured in a study of citation chances. The next wave re-measured it one month on: ChatGPT opened its answer just as often, and credited five distinct domains instead of six.

Where an ad is not allowed to go

Ads are not eligible near sensitive or regulated content, including personal health, mental health and politics, and political advertising is not accepted. During the initial test, ads are concentrated in consumer verticals: lifestyle and household goods, local services, travel and experiences, digital products and education.

Regulated categories follow a map of their own, and it is not the map of open markets, which is the thing to check before building a plan. Advertisers in financial services, healthcare and legal services can be approved case by case, after manual review and on proof of a licence to practise, but in the United States only: outside the United States, advertising for those three families of services remains prohibited. The rules were sharpened twice in August, version 1.4 on housing and employment, version 1.5 on American legal services. An ad cannot carry an individual job opening or a specific property to rent or buy; linking to a platform that lists them stays possible as long as neither the creative nor the landing page points at one particular listing.

What the person on the other side controls

Ad controls live in the ChatGPT settings for Free and Go accounts in the regions where ads run. From there a person can turn personalisation off, hide an ad, report it, see why it was shown, and clear the data used to select ads, which is retained for up to thirty days before removal.

With personalisation off, ads still match the current thread, but other threads, ad history and topics are no longer used. If memory is on, memories and recent chats may inform which ad is selected. Interactions with ads, such as hiding or clicking one, are not written into memory. By default ChatGPT cannot see the ads shown to a person: sharing one into the conversation is a deliberate gesture, and it does not let the advertiser influence what ChatGPT then says about it. On the Free plan, an ads free experience is available in exchange for lower usage limits and reduced access to some tools, and the switch back and forth lives in those same settings.

What comes back to the advertiser

Reporting covers impressions, clicks, spend, click through rate, average cost per click, average cost per thousand impressions and conversions. Conversations, chat history, memories, names, email addresses, IP addresses and precise location never reach the advertiser: what returns is aggregated. If someone messages an advertiser through an ad, the advertiser sees only the messages sent to them.

Post click measurement gained instruments over the summer. To the static tracking parameters, UTMs among them, which survive an ad click, OpenAI added a pixel, a conversions API and integrations with third party measurement providers. The channel is therefore identifiable in your own analytics, by the same means as any other paid source, and a conversion can now be traced back to the campaign that produced it.

Three doors into the inventory

Buying happens through the self-serve Ads Manager, through the agency groups that placed the first campaigns, or through ad technology partners. Criteo was the first such partner to integrate with the pilot, followed by others including Adobe, Kargo, Pacvue and StackAdapt. The three doors reach the same auction; they differ in who builds the campaign and in what reporting sits on top. OpenAI said on 18 August that tens of thousands of marketers had already run campaigns.

What advertisers report

Published first hand accounts are still few, so we set an entry rule and kept it: a named author, a stated spend, a stated period. Anything reporting benchmarks without a sample or a date was left out, and that removed more articles than it kept. Eight accounts qualify.

Two campaigns at $200 and $500 carry no average, and the authors of the small tests say as much themselves: thin creative written around features rather than needs, a budget spent in about an hour, a first run its own author calls a smoke test rather than a test. Read the table for its axis rather than its levels.

The axis is visible. The five accounts reporting no conversion are all selling to professionals, and ads serve the Free and Go plans, so a large share of the buyers they are looking for sit outside the inventory by construction. The one large spend in the set, a consumer account running first party tracking, reports a cost per click five to seven times lower and a positive return, with daily figures ranging from 0.2 to 2.9 times return on spend across fifteen days.

The two newest entries add a variable the first six did not show: the bid. Andy Brice bid between seven and fifteen pence where the manager suggested two pounds, took close to three thousand clicks at ten pence each, and ended with fourteen installs. Conversion Logix compared the two buying modes across five property campaigns and paid less than half as much per session buying on clicks as on impressions, $4.63 against $10.06, with a better click through rate on top. A low bid buys volume, then; what that volume is worth is the question left standing.

The picture from the ad technology side is different in scale and in kind. Criteo reported in June 2026 that more than two thousand brands were live through its integration, with click through rates two to three times those of comparable formats elsewhere and more than eighty per cent of ad driven traffic coming from new customers, apparel, home furnishings, consumer electronics, automotive and beauty leading the categories. These are Criteo's own figures on its own client base, in curated verticals, and independent verification at that scale does not exist yet.

The brands named in the pilot say something else again, and their silence is itself informative: Target, Williams-Sonoma, Albertsons and The Knot Worldwide have all confirmed taking part, and none has published performance. The Knot's chief marketing officer described the pilot as carrying no hard performance targets, framed as a way to observe behaviour and traffic while the format is young.

The measurement gap, and what moved it

Four of the first six accounts described the same thing without citing one another: the platform's click count and the site's analytics did not agree. Symphonic Digital recorded 53 clicks in the platform against 35 sessions in analytics in July. Out of the Box Advisors found no matching traffic in their own tools. Grow My Ads hit a tracking bug, rebuilt the campaign without UTM parameters, and watched the traffic land as direct. Opascope moved to first party tracking, reporting that the native dashboard was under counting conversions.

The August and September readings describe something else, and that is the most useful update on this page. Andy Brice began by testing that same gap and ruled it out: the clicks OpenAI reported matched the ones his analytics recorded. Conversion Logix does not talk about counting either, but about qualifying: the native conversion metric did not let the agency judge quality, so it tracked its own key events instead. In between, the tooling announced on 18 August added a pixel, a conversions API and third party integrations to tracking parameters that already survived the click.

The gap has moved, then, from counting to value. Counting clicks is a problem with instruments that exist; knowing what a click is worth stays the advertiser's work, and it is prepared before the budget starts running. Andy Brice had to instrument his site with a third party to establish that most of his clicks came from humans, and he established it. What was missing after that was not a counter, it was the intent behind the click.

Where this leaves a publisher

Three things follow from the mechanism itself. The eligible audience is the Free and Go plans, which sets the ceiling of who the channel can reach. The sponsored card and the cited sources are decided by separate systems, so a campaign changes nothing about how the answer above it is composed. And an ad click is identifiable on arrival, provided the parameters are in place before the budget starts running.

The corpus offers one comparison worth reading twice, because it comes from the same site, over the same period, in the hands of the same author. Across the twenty three days of August that Andy Brice measured, clicks bought inside ChatGPT converted at 0.46%, and visits arriving from ChatGPT answers without a purchase, at 4.2%. It is one site, one period and one author, and it is the only measurement in this corpus where both competitions on that screen are counted side by side.

If the goal is to appear inside the answer rather than below it, that is the other competition. It has its own mechanics, and we describe them in what GEO is and in why ChatGPT recommends your competitors. The budget that aims at the answer itself follows another map: the sources the engines read, ranked by measured weight.