How much do ChatGPT Ads cost?

How much do ChatGPT Ads cost?

That is the whole answer for most people, and the rest of this page is the detail underneath it: what you are actually buying, how the price of each click is decided, the one budget rule that catches people out, and what OpenAI has still not published about what ChatGPT advertising typically returns.

Everything stated as fact here comes from OpenAI’s own advertiser documentation, announcements and customer stories, and its published advertising terms, linked at the foot and read on 4 October 2026. Where a figure is not published, this page says so and stops.

What is the minimum spend on ChatGPT Ads?

The minimum is per campaign per day, not a lump sum you have to hand over. If you set the floor and run for a week, that is a week at the floor, and you can stop.

The figure varies by currency in a way that is not a straight conversion. OpenAI lists 725 INR, 2,500 JPY, 25,000 KRW, 40 BRL and 65 AED, among others. Whichever currency your account is set to at sign-up is the one that applies, and you cannot change it yourself afterwards, OpenAI says to email its ads support team if the wrong one went in. More on that on how do you advertise on ChatGPT.

This is worth stating plainly because we had it wrong ourselves until 6 September 2026. This site said OpenAI published no minimum, and it does. If you read that here before, this line is the correction.

Is a daily budget a cap on what you can spend?

So a 15-pound daily budget can take 30 pounds on a single busy day. What it cannot do is exceed 105 pounds across the week. The weekly figure is the real ceiling; the daily one is a pacing target.

OpenAI gives its own worked example: “If your campaign runs for 7 days with a $100 average daily budget, your total campaign media spend limit is $700.” And, in the paragraph after it: “Your campaign may spend more than $100 on some days and less than $100 on others. Across the full 7-day campaign, billed media spend will not exceed $700.”

If you are used to a daily budget behaving as a hard stop, set the number you can live with across a week and divide by seven, rather than setting the number you can live with in a day. Or choose OpenAI’s other budget type, one total for the whole campaign, which its campaign article calls “the stricter control for total spend”. OpenAI recommends starting with a daily budget if you are new, and a campaign moved from a total to a daily budget cannot be moved back.

How do you actually pay for ChatGPT Ads?

You are billed one of two ways, per thousand times your ad is shown, or per click, and you pick one of three goals when you set the campaign up. OpenAI’s campaign article names them: “Choose Views (CPM), Clicks (CPC), or Conversions.” The third aims delivery at people likely to do the thing you want, but you still pay per click or per thousand views, whichever you choose for it. In OpenAI’s words: “You do not pay per conversion.”

On the Views and Clicks goals you can set a maximum bid for each group of ads, the most you will pay per thousand views, or per click. That maximum is what you are willing to pay, not what you will pay. On the Conversions goal the cap is a bid per conversion instead, and you are still charged per click or per thousand views, not per conversion. But a manual bid is not the default: OpenAI now sets bids for you unless you say otherwise. “For eligible new ad groups, Maximize results is selected by default.” The $3 to $5 figure below is OpenAI’s advice for the manual setting, not the automatic one.

Billing after the fact matters for cashflow: the money leaves after the advertising has run, not before. It also means a landing-page problem can cost you twice, which is covered on what are the ChatGPT Ads landing page requirements.

Does the highest bid win?

Second-price means your maximum bid is a ceiling rather than a price tag. If you bid 5 dollars and the next advertiser is at 2, you will not necessarily pay 5. OpenAI has not published exactly how relevance and bid are combined, so treat your maximum as the most you can be charged and nothing finer.

Relevance-weighted means a better-fitting ad can beat a bigger budget. What “better-fitting” is made of is published: OpenAI says selection “considers multiple signals, including the context and intent of the current conversation, the ad’s landing page, title, copy, advertiser-provided context hints, and, when ads personalization is enabled, select signals from a user’s broader ChatGPT experience.”

Your landing page is in that list. It is not only where the click lands, it is part of what decides whether the click ever happens.

What does an agency cost on top?

The first 30 days cover opening the account, getting the landing page readable and fast, installing the tracking that tells you which clicks became customers, building the first campaigns, and then running them for a month.

Both figures are a floor rather than a fixed fee. Larger accounts, several markets, extra campaigns or heavier creative work are quoted at a fixed price in writing before anything starts. We do not take a percentage of what you spend on ads, so nothing we earn goes up when your budget does.

If those figures do not work for your business, that is a useful thing to learn from a page rather than from a sales call. The free site check is still worth running either way.

What does ChatGPT advertising return?

This is the single most important thing on this page, because it is the gap every agency in this category fills with a number.

OpenAI continues: “Results will depend on factors such as campaign objective, creative, landing page experience, relevance to the user, and overall setup.” That is an honest statement of the position rather than a hedge: ads started appearing in ChatGPT on 9 February 2026, so there is not yet much history for anyone to average.

So any figure you are quoted for what ChatGPT advertising “typically” delivers did not come from OpenAI, because OpenAI has not produced one. It came from somebody’s own small sample, or from nowhere.

What you can measure is your own. OpenAI’s reporting covers impressions, clicks, spend, click-through rate, average cost per click, average cost per thousand and conversions. OpenAI says impressions, clicks and click-through rate typically refresh about every 15 minutes, while spend can lag by about 7 to 8 hours and the average costs update after that, so a spend figure of zero does not mean no charges are building up.

What OpenAI has not published

OpenAI’s advertiser help centre publishes no frequency cap and no repeat rule, and its reporting carries no figure that would reveal one. We looked across the policy pages, the help centre and the announcements. If you are used to capping how many times somebody sees your advertising, assume for now that you cannot, and check inside the tool when you have access.