How do you advertise on AI search engines like ChatGPT?

OpenAI began testing advertising in ChatGPT on February 9, 2026, with adult users on the Free and Go plans in the United States, expanding country by country. La Presse carried the AFP dispatch the next day.

Three things to note before going further. First, ads only appear on the Free and Go plans: Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts see none. Second, a user can turn them off, but their daily free message allowance is reduced, which means most keep them. Third, advertiser availability still varies by country, and you need to check yours before building a budget.

The context helps explain why this network will grow fast, and therefore why today's bids won't stay at this level.

According to AFP, only a fraction of ChatGPT's billion users subscribe, while the computing power required costs enormous sums. OpenAI is aligning its model with Google's and Meta's, whose strength rests on advertising attached to free services.

A network that has to fund infrastructure at that scale won't stay quiet for long. That's exactly the window where the cost of entry is lowest.

The speed of adoption explains the rest. Radio-Canada reported as early as February 2023 that ChatGPT had reached 100 million monthly active users in January, just two months after opening to the public on November 30, 2022. Analysis firm UBS, citing Similarweb, called it the fastest ramp-up ever observed for a consumer web application: roughly 13 million unique visits per day, more than double the previous month. TikTok took close to nine months to pass the same mark, Instagram two and a half years.

Three years later, that same product has a billion users and is opening its advertising inventory. An audience built at that speed does not stay cheap for long.

The ad appears below ChatGPT's answer, clearly labelled as sponsored and visually separated. It doesn't influence the answer: the two systems are distinct, and no advertiser can steer, rank or modify what ChatGPT says.

Each ad has six elements: the advertiser name, your favicon, a headline, description text, an image and the landing page.

This is the most disorienting difference for anyone coming from Google.

You don't reserve keywords. At the ad group level, you provide context hints: you describe the conversations, topics or needs your offer is relevant to. The system uses them to steer matching, but they aren't exact matches and they guarantee no specific placement.

The system weighs several signals: the context and intent of the current conversation, your landing page, your headline, your text, your context hints, and. if the user has enabled personalization. certain signals from their broader ChatGPT use.

Context-based targeting stays abstract until you apply it. Take an accounting firm in Laval looking for new business clients.

On Google, you buy three phrases: "accountant Laval", "bookkeeping business", "small business taxes". You know nothing about the person typing them. They could be an individual, an accounting student, or a competitor checking your position.

Inside ChatGPT, by the time your ad can appear, the person has often already written something like this:

So you don't reserve keywords. You describe situations. For that firm, the context signals would look like this:

The difference is visible: Google sells you a three-word intent, ChatGPT puts you in front of someone who has already described their problem, their urgency and their budget.

One detail that matters in Quebec: these conversations happen in French. Your context signals, your headlines and your landing page need to be in French to match. It's obvious, and it will still be missed by advertisers who mechanically translate campaigns designed in Toronto.

Two possible objectives, and you choose based on what you're after:

Selection runs through second-price auctions weighted by relevance. In other words, a highly relevant ad can beat a higher bid that's less well aligned. That's good news for well-targeted small businesses.

The Ads Manager reports impressions, clicks, spend, click-through rate, average cost per click, average CPM and conversions.

Two things to configure from the start, otherwise you're flying blind: conversion measurement in the Ads Manager, and UTM parameters on your landing pages. Those parameters survive the click, which makes ChatGPT traffic visible in your existing analytics instead of landing in a “direct” bucket.

OpenAI doesn't share conversations with advertisers and doesn't sell user data. You receive only aggregated, non-identifying reports: views, clicks, conversions.

No advertiser has access to chats, history, memories or personal information. If someone promises you targeting based on conversation content, they aren't describing this product.

Since the network isn't open everywhere yet, the real question isn't "when do I launch" but "what can I have ready the day it opens". Here's our list.

Creating the advertiser account and verifying identity takes administrative time, not talent. It may as well be done in advance.

We write out the situations where your offer is relevant, as in the example above. Then we confront them with reality: we ask ChatGPT the questions your clients would ask and watch which phrasings come back, so the signals describe conversations that actually happen rather than ones we imagined.

Headline, description and visual. The format is short and the space is tight: every word has to carry. We prepare several versions so we can compare from the first days instead of waiting a month for a second option.

This is the part most advertising agencies don't do, because they don't write code. A paid click landing on a slow, vague page with no way to reach you is a wasted click. We build it. It's the same work as on our projects, with the form, the speed and the tracking that go with it.

Without measurement, a campaign is an opinion. We set up tracking before the first dollar is spent, not three weeks in when we're trying to work out what happened.

Before launching anything, we record where you stand: do you already come up in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot answers for your key questions, and how are you described? Without that starting picture, you'll never be able to show the campaign changed anything. It's the same reading as in our GEO optimization offering.

If you want to do it yourself: create an account in the Ads Manager, set up a first campaign with a Clicks objective, a starting bid between US$3 and US$5, and context signals that precisely describe the situations where your offer is useful. Measure for two weeks before touching anything.

If you'd rather we handled it, that's exactly the service we built. Going through an agency changes four concrete things.

You don't learn on your own budget. The first weeks on a new ad network are mostly spent figuring out what the system rewards. When we run it, those lessons come from our other clients' campaigns and are already paid for.

Context signals are written, not guessed. This is the piece that decides whether your ads show at all. Describing the situations where your offer is relevant, then correcting them based on the conversations that actually trigger your impressions, takes rounds of adjustment nobody gets right on the first try.

Your ads lead somewhere. A paid click landing on a slow, vague page with no way to reach you is a wasted click. We also build the landing page, the form and the tracking, because that's where a campaign turns into a contract.

You keep the full picture. ChatGPT is only one of the surfaces where people look for you. A dollar is sometimes better spent there than elsewhere, sometimes not, and that answer changes by month and by industry.

Advertising inside ChatGPT is part of our digital visibility offering, alongside search optimization, positioning inside AI-generated answers, and Google campaigns.

OpenAI. Ads in ChatGPT: the basics. Format, selection, delivery, pricing and measurement. OpenAI Help Center. View

OpenAI. Our approach to advertising. Principles, independence of answers and the controls offered to users. View

OpenAI Ads. Ads Manager. Country availability, campaign creation and advertiser documentation. View

La Presse, Agence France-Presse. February 10, 2026. “ChatGPT has begun testing advertising”: launch date, plans affected, user numbers. View

Radio-Canada. February 2, 2023. "ChatGPT sets the record for the fastest-growing user base": the 100-million-user mark, the UBS study citing Similarweb, comparison with TikTok and Instagram. Read

The figures and rules described on this page come from OpenAI's official publications and from media coverage. Checked on August 16, 2026; this information evolves, so confirm with the source before any budget decision.