Guide
How ads in ChatGPT work: the sponsored slot, the auction, and the answer above it
Founder of Epovest
Ads have been part of ChatGPT since 9 February 2026, in the United States, for 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 the first advertisers have published about running it. Facts verified on 7 August 2026 against the OpenAI help centre and the ad policies.
Where the ad sits, and who sees it
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. 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.
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 and the price
Among eligible ads, ranking runs a relevance weighted second price auction. Buying happens by objective: the Reach objective optimises for impressions and pays per thousand, the Clicks objective optimises for clicks and pays per valid click. 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.
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.
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. Advertisers in financial services, healthcare and medicine, and legal services can be approved, case by case and by manual review, and even then the placement rules near sensitive conversations still apply.
What the person on the other side controls
Ad controls live in the ChatGPT settings for Free and Go accounts in the United States. 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.
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.
One line in the documentation matters more than the rest for measurement: static tracking parameters, UTMs among them, persist on an ad click. The channel is therefore identifiable in your own analytics, by the same means as any other paid source.
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.
What the first 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. Six accounts qualified.
| Author | Period | Spend | Clicks | CTR | CPC | Conversions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Murat Bock, adlibrary.com | 2 weeks | $200 | ~40 | ~0.8% | ~$5 | 0 |
| Out of the Box Advisors | published 24 July | $500 | ~140 | not stated | ~$3.50 | 0 |
| Shawn Walker, Symphonic Digital | 1 month, published 3 August | ~$500 | 53 | not stated | ~$9 | 0 |
| Austin LeClear, Grow My Ads | ~2 weeks, published 3 August | ~$1,200 | 92 | 1% | ~$13 | 0 |
| Alex Thilén, Opascope | 15 days | ~$60,000 | ~34,900 | not stated | ~$1.72 | 2.35% conversion rate, 1.49x return on ad spend |
| Q1Media | published 24 July, aggregated | not stated | not stated | 0.5% to 2.5% | ~$5 | ~2%, cost per acquisition around $500 |
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 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, reported four times independently
Four of the six accounts describe the same thing without citing one another: the platform's click count and the site's analytics do not agree. Symphonic Digital recorded 53 clicks in the platform against 35 sessions in analytics. 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 under counts conversions.
The documentation and the reports point at the same fix. Tracking parameters survive the click, so a first campaign should carry them from the first hour, and the reference number should be the one your own analytics records. A channel that cannot be recognised on arrival cannot be judged, and four independent reports of the same gap say the recognition has to be set up rather than assumed.
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.
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.