ChatGPT Ads / Field guide
ChatGPT Ads:
how the advertising actually works.
ChatGPT Ads put clearly labelled sponsored placements beneath ChatGPT responses. They can reach people while they are exploring, comparing and deciding, but they do not change the answer above them.
This guide explains what advertisers can control, what OpenAI controls, how campaigns are bought and measured, why the landing page matters, and what paying for an advert does not buy.
Last verified against OpenAI documentation ·
ChatGPT answer
Earned
Useful answer.
Not for sale.
Sponsored
Paid
Advertiser placement.
Bought through the ad system.
01 / The basics
What are ChatGPT Ads?
ChatGPT Ads are clearly labelled advertisements displayed separately from the response ChatGPT gives.
A standard ad can include the advertiser name, favicon, headline, description, image and a link to a landing page.
What makes the format interesting is the moment in which it appears.
People use ChatGPT to explain what they are trying to accomplish, compare alternatives, clarify constraints and work through decisions. That gives the advertising system more context than a single short search query often contains.
OpenAI can use the intent and context of the current conversation when deciding which eligible advert may be relevant. Where ad personalization is enabled, permitted signals from a user’s broader ChatGPT experience may also contribute.
That does not mean advertisers receive the conversation.
They do not.
The advertiser supplies the campaign, message, destination, bid, context hints and other supported settings. OpenAI decides whether the advert is eligible and when to show it.
ChatGPT response
Answer
Not bought
Sponsored placement
Advert
Paid
Landing page
Destination
Owned by advertiser
Source: OpenAI Help Center,
02 / The line
Can you pay ChatGPT to recommend your business?
No.
OpenAI keeps advertisements separate from ChatGPT’s answers, and advertising does not buy a place inside the answer itself.
That distinction gets blurred surprisingly often.
A business can pay to compete for the sponsored placement shown around a relevant conversation. It cannot pay OpenAI to rewrite the answer above it in the business’s favour.
Earned
Inside the answer
The business may be surfaced, cited or mentioned because the systems involved in producing the answer consider it relevant.
Paid
Sponsored placement
The advertiser enters the advertising system and pays when campaigns deliver according to the selected buying model.
These two routes can exist at the same time.
A business may earn visibility inside an answer and also run an advert beneath it. One does not cause the other, and paying for the advert does not improve the unpaid answer.
You can buy the advert.You cannot buy the answer.
Source: OpenAI,
03 / Relevance
How does ChatGPT decide which advert to show?
ChatGPT Ads is not simply a keyword auction placed inside a chatbot.
OpenAI says its ad system considers multiple signals when selecting and delivering eligible ads. Those can include the context and intent of the current conversation, the advert’s landing page, title and copy, advertiser-provided context hints and, where personalization is enabled, permitted signals from the user’s broader ChatGPT experience.
Advertisers can write context hints describing conversations, needs, topics or keywords where an offer may be useful.
But a context hint is not an exact-match keyword.
Writing “emergency plumber” does not instruct ChatGPT to show the advert every time somebody types those words.
It gives the system additional information about relevance.
The campaign can also use supported settings such as geography, platform and custom audiences where available.
That changes the optimisation problem.
The bid matters.
The creative matters.
The landing page matters.
The context supplied by the advertiser matters.
And OpenAI still decides which eligible ad wins the opportunity.
- 01Conversation
- 02Intent
- 03Context hint
- 04Creative
- 05Landing page
- 06Auction
- 07Ad
Relevance lives across the whole path, not just the bid.
Source: OpenAI Help Center,
04 / Buying
How much do ChatGPT Ads cost?
There is no single price for a ChatGPT advert.
OpenAI currently supports different campaign objectives and buying models.
| Objective | Buying signal | What it optimises for |
|---|---|---|
| Views | CPM | Optimise for impressions.Bought on a CPM basis, cost per thousand impressions. |
| Clicks | CPC | Optimise for visits to the destination.Bought on a CPC basis, cost per valid click. |
| Conversions | Business outcome | Optimise toward a supported conversion event when conversion measurement has been configured.Billed per valid click or per thousand impressions, not per conversion. |
- Bid + relevance + eligibility
- Auction
- Delivery
For CPC campaigns, OpenAI currently recommends considering a maximum starting bid around $3–$5 USD per valid click.
That is platform guidance, not a promise that every click will cost $3–$5.
OpenAI describes the selection process as a relevance-weighted, second-price auction. The bid therefore matters, but the largest bid does not automatically make an irrelevant advert useful.
Businesses also choose the campaign budget.
The correct budget depends on customer value, margin, conversion rate, market, objective and how much data is needed to make a sensible decision.
We would rather calculate a test from those numbers than publish one fake “recommended budget” for every company.
Source: OpenAI Help Center,
05 / The page
The advert can be approved. The landing page still has to work.
The page behind a ChatGPT advert is not merely somewhere to send the click.
OpenAI reviews landing pages for advertising-policy compliance and can use information from the destination when determining relevance.
The page also needs to be reachable by OpenAI’s advertising crawler.
For ChatGPT Ads, OAI-AdsBot is the important one.
OpenAI requires advertisers to allow OAI-AdsBot for landing-page validation and review. Its crawler guidance calls OAI-SearchBot recommended, but its guide to creating ads says landing pages must not block either one, so allow both.
That means a perfectly normal-looking website can still create a campaign problem if something underneath it blocks access.
Common obstacles include:
- robots.txt
- WAF rules
- CDN security
- Bot mitigation
- Authentication
- Rate limits
- Broken redirects
The page also still has to do the human job after the crawler reaches it.
It should match the advert, explain the offer, work properly on a phone, load quickly, make the next action obvious and give measurement somewhere meaningful to happen.
- 01Ad
- 02OAI-AdsBot
- 03Page
- 04Policy review
- 05User
- 06Action
- Reachable
- Consistent
- Fast
- Measurable
Buying the click does not repair the page after it arrives.
Source: OpenAI Help Center,
06 / Measurement
What can ChatGPT Ads actually measure?
Ads Manager now reports considerably more than whether an advert appeared.
Current reporting can include:
- Impressions
- How many times the advert was served.
- Clicks
- How many valid clicks it received.
- Spend
- What the campaign spent.
- CTR
- The percentage of impressions that became clicks.
- Avg CPC / CPM
- The average cost of the selected buying model.
- Conversions
- Attributed actions when conversion measurement has been configured.
For deeper measurement, advertisers can send conversion events through the OpenAI Pixel, the Conversions API or supported measurement integrations.
OpenAI also supports normal URL tracking parameters, so ChatGPT Ads traffic can be compared inside existing analytics systems.
When somebody clicks an ad, OpenAI may append a click reference to the destination URL. Preserving that signal through the journey can improve attribution.
For Crawl Nine, the important part is what happens after the advertising metric.
A click is not a customer.
Depending on the business, the useful event may be:
- Lead
- Booking
- Registration
- Purchase
- Application
The question eventually becomes:
What did we spend, and what commercially useful actions came back?
We don’t report activity simply because activity is easy to count.
Source: OpenAI Help Center,
07 / Availability
Who can advertise, and who actually sees the adverts?
- 01
Advertiser access
OpenAI has expanded self-service Ads Manager to more than 60 countries.
That includes the United States, United Kingdom, large parts of Europe, India and markets across the Middle East, North Africa and Asia Pacific.
The list is changing quickly.
- 02
Who sees ads
OpenAI currently keeps ads away from Plus, Pro and Business plans and from accounts identified as belonging to people under 18.
Ads are part of supported ad-funded ChatGPT experiences rather than every version of ChatGPT.
OpenAI also avoids serving ads alongside sensitive user contexts.
- 03
Business category
OpenAI’s current ad policies focus primarily on consumer categories such as local services, household and consumer goods, travel and experiences, and digital products or education.
Some regulated categories, including areas of healthcare, finance and legal services, can be eligible subject to stricter rules, geography, verification and case-by-case approval.
Other categories remain prohibited.
Examples currently include political advertising, gambling, tobacco, alcohol, adult/dating advertising and various other regulated or unsafe products.
Policy changes quickly enough that eligibility should be checked before campaign work begins.
Source: OpenAI,
08 / No guessing
What nobody should promise you yet.
ChatGPT Ads is developing quickly.
That makes it easy to turn one campaign result, one platform update or one agency opinion into a universal claim.
We won’t.
- A context hint does not guarantee that an advert appears in a specific conversation.
- Campaign approval does not guarantee a specific volume of delivery.
- A paid advert does not improve the answer ChatGPT writes.
- A suggested starting bid is not a guaranteed CPC.
- One company’s return on ad spend is not a benchmark for every advertiser.
- And no agency can know your conversion rate before real traffic reaches the real offer.
OpenAI has published individual advertiser examples, but an example is not a universal expectation.
The sensible approach is:
- 01configure the campaign properly
- 02measure what happens
- 03compare cost with business value
- 04change the inputs
- 05test again
Early does not mean unknowable.It means measure before you claim.
Source: OpenAI Help Center,
09 / Want us to run it?
That’s what Amplify is for.
Amplify is Crawl Nine’s paid AI advertising service.
For ChatGPT Ads, we can handle the work around the campaign: eligibility checks, account and campaign structure, context hints, creative, landing-page readiness, crawler access, conversion measurement and ongoing optimisation.
The advertiser owns the advertising account.
Media spend is paid directly to OpenAI.
Crawl Nine does not mark up the media budget.
First 30 days
From$2,500
Then
From$1,500/ month
Media spend separate
10 / Questions
ChatGPT Ads questions, answered directly.
Are ChatGPT Ads the same as ChatGPT recommendations?
No. Ads are sponsored placements displayed separately from ChatGPT’s answer. OpenAI states that advertising does not influence the answers ChatGPT gives. A business can pay for advertising delivery; it cannot pay to be written into the answer.
Do ChatGPT Ads use keywords?
Not in the same way as traditional exact-match search advertising. Advertisers can provide context hints that describe topics, needs, conversations or keywords where an offer may be relevant. They help the system understand relevance, but they are not exact-match controls and they do not guarantee that the advert appears whenever somebody uses a particular word.
How are ChatGPT Ads different from Google Ads?
Both are auction-based advertising systems, but the context is different. Google Search advertising often starts with a search query. ChatGPT Ads can consider the intent and context of a conversation, the advert, the landing page and advertiser-provided context hints when determining relevance. That makes the relationship between the conversation, message and destination especially important.
Can I advertise on ChatGPT from the UK or Europe?
Yes, subject to the business and category meeting the current advertising policies. OpenAI has expanded self-service Ads Manager across the United Kingdom and 31 European markets. Availability continues to expand, so advertisers should still check the live country list before opening or configuring an account.
Can ChatGPT Ads track leads and sales?
Yes, where measurement is configured correctly. Ads Manager can report conversions, and advertisers can send supported conversion events using the OpenAI Pixel, Conversions API or supported measurement partners. Standard analytics tracking parameters can also be added to landing-page URLs.
Does my website need to allow OpenAI crawlers?
For ChatGPT advertising, yes. OpenAI states that OAI-AdsBot must be able to access the landing page for validation and review. OpenAI also recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot, and if you advertise from a product feed, it says to let OAI-SearchBot reach your product image URLs. Robots rules, firewalls, CDNs, bot protection, authentication and rate limiting can all accidentally block access.
How much should I spend on ChatGPT Ads?
There is no responsible universal number. OpenAI currently suggests a starting maximum CPC bid around $3–$5 for click campaigns, but actual campaign economics depend on the market, customer value, conversion rate, competition, objective and relevance. Crawl Nine recommends test budgets from the business numbers rather than choosing one arbitrary spend for everyone.
More questions, each answered in depth: ChatGPT Ads answers
Official sources
Where this guide gets its information.
ChatGPT advertising is changing quickly. We base platform claims on OpenAI’s own advertiser documentation and advertising policies rather than repeating third-party assumptions.
Last verified against OpenAI documentation ·
11 / Run a campaign
Ready to test paid visibility inside ChatGPT?
The platform is new.
The buying mechanics are real.
The only useful answer comes from setting the campaign up properly and measuring what happens.
First 30 days from $2,500 · then from $1,500 / month · media spend separate