ChatGPT Ads is open. Here is how to be first

ChatGPT Ads is open for business. Any company in one of the nine countries OpenAI lists as available, including Australia, New Zealand, the UK, the US and Canada, can sign in to OpenAI Ads Manager (Beta), verify its business, add a card and have ads running inside ChatGPT conversations, with no published minimum spend. From Monday, 31 European countries join the list, and OpenAI says tens of thousands of marketers have already advertised on ChatGPT. Today Nitro Sites is launching Nitro Ads for ChatGPT, a managed service for businesses that want to be in their category’s auction this month rather than next year.

What is live, and where

OpenAI began testing ads in ChatGPT in the United States on 9 February 2026 and announced pilots for Canada, Australia and New Zealand on 26 March (OpenAI); by mid-April, Australian Free and Go users were seeing ads (Mi3, AdNews). On 11 August OpenAI confirmed launches in the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea, and on 19 August it said ChatGPT Ads would expand to 31 European countries “next week”, through its sales team and partners first, with self-serve access to follow (OpenAI).

On the buying side, the self-serve Ads Manager beta, CPC bidding and conversion measurement tools were announced on 5 May (OpenAI, Axios), and Australian businesses were reported buying directly in the beta from late May (Mi3). August added conversion-optimised bidding, rolling seven-day daily budgets, automatic pacing, geographic exclusions and advanced matching (AdNews). OpenAI’s availability page lists Ads Manager as available to advertisers in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, Korea, Brazil and Mexico, with the 31 European countries marked coming soon.

The audience is not small. OpenAI reported 900 million weekly active users in February (TechCrunch) and now cites 1 billion weekly active users (OpenAI, August 2026). Telsyte counts 13.8 million Australians who used ChatGPT in the past year (B&T), and Similarweb attributed 10.1 per cent of ChatGPT ad impressions to Australia in June, behind only the United States and Canada (Similarweb).

Where the ads appear, and who sees them

Ads show to people on ChatGPT’s Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts do not see them, and neither do accounts OpenAI identifies as under 18 (OpenAI help). An ad appears below the end of a response, clearly labelled as sponsored and visually separated from the answer, and is not eligible near sensitive topics such as personal health, mental health or politics. OpenAI states that ads do not influence ChatGPT’s answers and that conversations are never shared with advertisers.

The ad unit is small: your advertiser name and favicon, a title, a line of copy, an image and a landing page link (Ads in ChatGPT: The Basics). What makes it powerful is the moment: someone has just asked a question and is deciding what to do next.

Monitoring by AI-search analytics firm Cloro, reported by Mi3, found sponsored placements in 49.8 per cent of monitored Australian responses in the week to 3 July, up from 19.8 per cent in late May.

How buying works

You buy through OpenAI Ads Manager (Beta) at ads.openai.com, signing in with an OpenAI account tied to your work email (Quickstart). There is no agency manager account: the business creates and owns its account, then invites whoever runs it, with Admin, Member and Viewer roles (user roles). The structure has three levels:

• Campaign: objective, budget, dates and targeting. Objectives are CPM (billed per thousand impressions), CPC (per click) or conversion-optimised (still billed per click). Budgets are campaign-total or daily. Targeting is by country and platform, with custom audiences to include or exclude and geographic exclusions. An objective cannot be changed after creation (Create Campaigns).
• Ad group: a theme or intent area, described with context hints. These are not keywords. OpenAI calls them “broad thematic signals, not exact keyword matching” and suggests describing a real need, for example “cushioned everyday running shoes for beginners training for their first 5K” rather than “running shoes” (Create Ad Groups).
• Ad: a short title, one line of copy, a square image up to 1200 by 1200 pixels, and a landing page URL that can carry your own UTM parameters (Create Ads).

Delivery is decided by what OpenAI describes as a relevance-weighted, second-price auction, using the context and intent of the current conversation, your landing page, title, copy and context hints. You set a maximum bid at ad-group level; for CPC campaigns OpenAI recommends starting at US$3 to $5 per click (The Basics). OpenAI publishes no minimum monthly spend. Billing is postpay to a card matched to the account’s country, charged when you reach a payment threshold and again at month end (Billing & Payment).

What you need before you start

1. A verified account. Ads Manager asks for your legal business name, website and billing details, then business verification (run through Persona, checking registered name, number, address and a matching company card) and a separate account review. OpenAI says it cannot expedite either, and third parties report anywhere from two to twelve days (Account Setup, Index Lab). Country, billing currency and time zone are locked at creation, so get them right the first time.

2. A business and an offer that clear policy. OpenAI’s ad policies (v1.4, August 2026) review at three levels: the advertiser, the creative and landing page, and the placement. Gambling, alcohol and vaping, adult content, political content, recreational drugs, legal services and unsupported wellness claims are among the disallowed categories. Financial services and health services are restricted, case by case, and OpenAI says both are “generally prohibited” outside the US. The categories open today are consumer goods, local services, travel, entertainment, education and digital products.

3. A landing page that converts and that OpenAI can crawl. OpenAI visits your landing page to check policy and to decide when your ad is relevant. It must be a normal, reachable web page, not an app store link, with no login wall, and it must not block the OAI-AdsBot or OAI-SearchBot user agents. Bot-protection challenges and robots.txt rules are the usual causes of a silent rejection (crawler guidance).

4. Conversion tracking. Create a data source in Ads Manager and send conversion events with the OpenAI Pixel, the Conversions API, or both. Ads Manager appends an oppref click reference to your landing page URL; the pixel stores it in a first-party cookie and ties later conversions back to the click (Conversion Measurement). Without this you cannot run conversion-optimised campaigns, and you are judging a new channel on clicks alone.

Why the first movers in each category win

First, the auction. In a relevance-weighted auction with few bidders, a well-matched ad with a good landing page does not need to outbid anyone to serve. The roster of Australian advertisers named so far is short (telcos, energy retailers, a travel brand, a streaming service, a university and a retailer, per Mi3), and OpenAI itself says there are “no performance benchmarks across advertisers, industries, or campaign types” (FAQ). In most categories the auction is still thin, and whoever runs first writes the benchmark.

Second, learning data. Conversion-optimised campaigns bid on predicted conversion likelihood, which makes your own conversion history the asset. An advertiser who starts now with tracking installed has months of events by the time a competitor opens an account.

A realistic five-step launch plan

1. Day 1: create and verify. Create the Ads Manager account on a work email, on a screen-share if someone else will run it (legal name, country, currency and time zone are permanent), add the logo, set billing, start verification and invite your team.
2. Days 1 to 2: landing page and tracking. Confirm the page loads fast on mobile, allows OAI-AdsBot, and carries the pixel. Create the data source and fire a test lead or purchase event.
3. Days 2 to 3: build the structure. One campaign per goal, one ad group per intent, three to five ads per group with different titles and copy. Start on CPC with a daily budget you can hold for two weeks.
4. Days 3 to 5: submit and launch. Expect impressions within 24 hours of going live, reports to lag by up to seven hours (Launch Campaigns), and attributed conversions to take 24 to 48 hours to appear (Measure Results).
5. Week 2 onward: optimise. Once a standard conversion event is flowing, create a conversion-optimised campaign for it (an existing CPC campaign cannot be converted), widen the context hints that serve, cut the ads that do not, and exclude regions where spend is wasted.

Common mistakes

• Writing context hints like a keyword list. Describe the need and the situation in natural phrases.
• Sending the click to your homepage. Build a page for that conversation.
• Choosing a conversion event that rarely fires. OpenAI warns that rare events make performance harder to evaluate (oCPC guide).
• Expecting Google Ads behaviour. Agencies report that ChatGPT users are often earlier in their research, so value the enquiry, not just the click.

Be first without running it yourself

Nitro Ads for ChatGPT is our managed service, live today. You own your OpenAI Ads Manager account and invite us in, so the account and its data stay yours. Setup is normally $990 and free on a three-month minimum managed plan: Starter is $499 a month, Growth $899 and Scale from $1,490. You pay your ad spend directly to OpenAI with no markup, conversion tracking is installed as part of setup, and your first campaign is live within five business days of your verification being approved. Every client gets a NitroSites portal login with a Nitro Ads dashboard: campaign status, updates from our team, monthly reports, change requests, and the option to cancel any time (the free setup carries a three-month minimum; cancel earlier and the $990 setup is simply billed).

Nitro Ads launched on day one: 22 August 2026. We launched our own campaigns the day self-serve ChatGPT Ads opened to us. We run ChatGPT Ads for businesses in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, the US and Canada, and we are a verified business advertiser on OpenAI Ads Manager (Beta) ourselves, running our own campaigns daily. We are an AI-first agency: NyXi, our AI Operations Manager, leads a fleet of specialist AI agents covering research, ad creative, tracking and measurement, landing page build, browser testing and content, which is how this service, its landing page, its ad creative, its conversion tracking and this article were all built and shipped in a single day. A trained human is accountable for your campaign, approves every change, and is the one who phones you.

Every Nitro Ads plan includes a custom funnel page for your offer, built and hosted by us, so you do not need a website to start and your existing site stays exactly as it is.