How to advertise on ChatGPT

What are ChatGPT ads?

ChatGPT ads are sponsored cards shown underneath the assistant’s answer. They carry your brand name, a favicon, a headline, a line of copy, an image and a link. They are labelled Sponsored and visually separated from the answer.

Two rules matter and OpenAI has repeated both since launch. Ads never change the answer the model gives. And ads do not appear on sensitive topics such as politics, health or mental health.

That is a large and unusually decision-stage audience. People do not open ChatGPT to browse. They open it to choose.

Step 1: Open the Ads Manager account

Go to ads.openai.com and create the account under your own business. The self-serve Ads Manager opened in beta on 5 May 2026 and the old $50,000 minimum went with it. The account side is covered step by step in how to sign up for ChatGPT ads.

• No account minimum since May 2026
• Daily minimum is small — roughly $25 a day in the US
• Billing, campaigns and history live in the account you create

If you hire an agency, insist the account stays yours and they get added as managers. There is no manager-account structure yet, so whoever creates the account owns the auction history — and that history is the asset. We only ever work inside the client’s own account for exactly this reason.

Step 2: Write your context hints

This is the part with no equivalent on Google or Meta, and it is where campaigns are won or lost. There are no keywords, no demographics, no lookalikes, no cookies.

Instead you write context hints: one or two plain sentences describing the conversation where your product genuinely belongs. OpenAI’s matching system reads those hints alongside the live conversation, your landing page and your ad copy, and decides whether you fit the moment.

The pattern that works: who is talking, what they are trying to do, and the detail that narrows it to your actual buyer. That last part is what stops you paying for conversations you cannot win.

If a hint would need a different landing page or a different audience, it belongs in a separate ad group. Do not stack unrelated hints together.

Step 3: Set a bid that actually delivers

Start at $3–5 per click. This is the single most common place new advertisers go wrong.

In our own account, bids under roughly three dollars rarely clear the delivery threshold. What happens next is predictable: the advertiser sees almost no impressions, decides the channel is not ready, and stops. The channel was fine. The bid was under the floor.

Since August 2026 you have more bidding options than at launch:

The auction is relevance-weighted and second price. Precision beats budget here in a way it does not on Google — a small advertiser with a tight hint can outrank a big brand running lazy copy.

Step 4: Install tracking before you spend anything

Install the OAIQ pixel and the Conversions API together, server-side, before the first click. Not after the first week.

Pixel-only tracking under-reports conversions on this channel. The result is worse than no data: teams switch off campaigns that were profitable and scale ones that were not. Since 17 August 2026, Automatic Advanced Matching is on by default for existing web pixels, which closes part of the gap but does not replace server-side events.

• Send lead, order and subscription events server-side
• Turn on dynamic URL parameters so campaign, ad group and ad IDs land in your analytics automatically
• Check the pixel validation diagnostics for dropped or disallowed events
• Remember view-through is one day — short, so do not over-credit it

Step 5: Write the ad like an answer, not a banner

Your ad appears under a genuine reply the person just read. Copy that sounds like an interruption gets ignored; copy that reads like the useful next step gets clicked.

• Lead with the specific thing they asked about, not your brand promise
• One concrete detail beats three adjectives — a price, a size, a trial length
• Match the landing page to the hint, because the system reads that page too
• For retail, upload a product feed and let the multi-product carousel do the merchandising

Step 6 and 7: Launch, then read the data honestly

Launch with enough budget to clear the noise. We recommend at least $3,000 a month in media before you draw any conclusions. Under that, daily swings drown the signal.

Give it two weeks before you judge anything. Then rank your hints on cost per customer, retire the losers, and write more of whatever shape the winners had.

What are the three mistakes that kill first campaigns?

1. Bidding under $3. You get no delivery and conclude the channel is dead.
2. Writing keywords instead of conversations. "crm software" is not a context hint. It matches nothing well and everything badly.
3. Pixel-only tracking. Your cost per customer is wrong, so every decision after it is wrong.

Last verified 23 Aug 2026 against OpenAI’s published documentation and our own live account. This channel changes monthly, so we re-check every figure on this page and restamp the date.

Sources: OpenAI Ads Manager documentation and help centre; Search Engine Land, August 2026; and our own live account.