Crawl Nine

How does ChatGPT Ads targeting work?

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How does ChatGPT Ads targeting work?

You do not buy keywords. You describe the conversations you want to show up in, and OpenAI’s system decides when your ad fits. On top of that you can narrow by country, by whether someone is on an iPhone, Android or the web, and by a customer list you upload yourself.

This is the part that behaves least like Google Ads, and the part most often described wrongly. Everything below is from OpenAI’s own advertiser documentation, linked at the foot.

Can you bid on keywords?

No. Instead you write “context hints”, short descriptions of the situations your product suits. OpenAI is blunt about their limits: “Context hints inform relevance. They are not exact-match keywords or targeting rules, and they do not guarantee delivery for particular conversations or audiences.”

OpenAI’s guide to writing hints goes further: hints “do not guarantee that your ad will appear for particular conversations, audiences, or situations, and they cannot enforce geographic limits, schedules, or exclusions.” So a hint is a suggestion to a matching system, not a booking.

OpenAI’s advice is to be specific about what you offer, who it helps and when it is useful. Its own example: instead of a broad hint like “running shoes”, use “cushioned everyday running shoes for beginners training for their first 5K”.

That is a real difference in how you think about the work. On a search engine you are guessing the words somebody types. Here you are describing the moment somebody is in, and somebody in that moment might never type your product’s name at all.

What decides which ad gets shown?

OpenAI weighs several things at once: what the conversation is about, the ad’s own landing page, its title and description, the hints the advertiser wrote, and the targeting they chose. Where several ads could fit, relevance and the bid are among the things that decide the order.

The full list, in OpenAI’s words: “It considers multiple signals, including the context and intent of your current conversation, the ad’s landing page, title, copy, advertiser-provided context hints and targeting selections, and, when ads personalization is enabled, select signals from your broader ChatGPT experience.”

Two things in that sentence are worth pulling out. Your landing page is a targeting input. What is written on the page you send people to helps decide when your ad appears, so a vague page is not only a weak page to arrive at, it is a weaker signal to match on.

And when more than one ad qualifies, OpenAI says it considers “a combination of factors, including relevance and advertiser bids when deciding which ad to show first”. The highest bidder does not simply win.

Can you target by place, or by device?

Yes to both. You can target by country, and in many countries by region or postcode, where OpenAI lists them. Television markets are United States only, and new campaigns built from a product feed stay country-wide. Pick any mix of the iPhone app, the Android app, the web on each kind of phone, and the web on a computer.

OpenAI’s wording: “In addition to country targeting, you can target supported locations such as states or regions, cities, markets, and postal codes where available. Location availability may vary by country.”

For platforms, Ads Manager lets you “select one or more supported platforms: Android app, Android web, Desktop web, iOS app, or iOS web.”

If you sell to one town, you can target less than the whole country. OpenAI’s own downloadable list of the places you can target includes postcode districts across the United Kingdom, such as BS1 in Bristol, so a plumber in Bristol can pick the postcodes they cover. Two catches: new campaigns built from a product feed can only target whole countries, and OpenAI says “Some new self-serve ad accounts can initially advertise only in their home country”, so a brand-new account may not be able to advertise abroad at first.

Can you upload your own customer list?

Yes, and this surprises people who assume the opposite. OpenAI accepts customer lists built from email addresses, phone numbers, hashed versions of either, or Google advertising IDs. But you need at least 25,000 matched people before you can target them.

The threshold is the catch, and for most small businesses it is decisive. OpenAI: “inclusion audiences and audience bid adjustments require at least 25,000 matched users. Audiences below 25,000 matched users can be used for exclusions. We recommend audiences of at least 100,000 users for inclusion targeting or bid adjustments.”

So a list of 800 past customers cannot be targeted. It can still be used to exclude, to stop paying to advertise at people who already bought.

Where a list does match, you can bid differently for those people: “Enter a multiplier between 0.1x and 10x.” Files can be up to 500 MB and an audience can hold more than five million people.

Customer lists do not work for campaigns aimed at the EU, Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein or Switzerland. OpenAI: “Custom audiences are not supported for campaigns targeting the European Economic Area (EEA) or Switzerland, where personalized ads are not yet available.”

What can you not control?

You cannot make your ad appear in a particular conversation, and you cannot promise yourself volume. OpenAI’s terms state that it does not guarantee “the performance, reach, frequency, or results of your advertising campaigns”, and that every campaign runs at its discretion.

Its automatic bidding carries the same caveat: “Maximize results prioritizes result volume and does not guarantee delivery against a specific CPA, CPC, ROAS, or other cost-efficiency target at this time.” That option is on by default for eligible new ad groups.

One more limit worth knowing, and it applies however good your targeting is: OpenAI does not place ads next to personal health or mental health conversations, and it does not currently allow political advertising at all.

What OpenAI has not published

There is no published rule about how often the same person can be shown the same ad. No frequency cap, no repeat limit, and no figure in the reporting that would reveal one. We searched OpenAI’s help centre and its full advertising API documentation and found nothing.

The reporting you get back is “impressions, clicks, spend, click-through rate (CTR), average CPC, average CPM, and conversions”. OpenAI’s fuller reporting guide also shows conversions from people who saw an ad without clicking it as a separate figure, and sales and return on ad spend for orders tracked back to an ad. A system with a frequency rule would normally report frequency or unique reach. Neither is there, in the help centre or in the API documentation. That is not proof of absence, and this page does not treat it as proof, it is simply what the published reporting shows.

Sources

All fetched 4 October 2026.