How to sign up for ChatGPT ads
Signing up is the easy part and takes an afternoon. Owning the account correctly is the part people get wrong, and it is permanent.
To sign up for ChatGPT ads, go to ads.openai.com, create an account with your business details, add a billing method and install the OAIQ pixel on your site. There is no minimum spend and no approval queue in self-serve markets, so most advertisers can have a campaign running the same day.
What do you need before you sign up?
Have these ready and the whole thing takes an afternoon rather than a week.
- Your business details — legal name, address, and whoever will own billing
- A billing method on the business, not a personal card you will want to swap later
- A landing page that matches what you sell. The matching system reads it, so a vague page hurts delivery
- Access to your site’s code or tag manager, to install the pixel
- A developer or agency for the Conversions API, because pixel-only tracking will misreport your cost per customer
The signup, step by step
- Go to ads.openai.com and create the account under your own business
- Enter business details and add billing
- Set your target country. Targeting is country level, so pick markets you can actually serve
- Install the OAIQ pixel site-wide and validate it in the diagnostics
- Add the Conversions API server-side for lead, order or subscription events
- Build your first ad group: context hints, ad copy, landing page, and a bid of about $3–5
What happens next is covered in the full build guide, how to advertise on ChatGPT.
Who can sign up today?
Self-serve signup is open in the nine live markets: the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Mexico and Brazil. The full list with dates is in where ChatGPT ads are available.
In the 31 European countries announced on 19 August 2026, self-serve is still arriving. Until it lands, European advertisers go through OpenAI’s Ads Solutions team, an agency partner or a technology partner.
You do not need to be based in a live market to sign up and buy into one. Targeting is country level and independent of where your business is registered.
How does agency access work?
This is the part worth getting right the first time, because it is hard to undo.
There is no manager-account structure yet — nothing equivalent to a Google Ads MCC. So whoever creates the account owns it, along with the billing, the data and the auction history that account accumulates.
| Do this | Not this |
|---|---|
| You create the account under your business | The agency creates it under theirs |
| You add the agency as managers | You get a login to an account you do not own |
| Billing sits on your business | Billing sits on the agency |
| You keep the history if you change agency | You start from zero if you change agency |
Relevance and performance history compound in this channel. An account with six months of learning does not bid against a fresh one on equal terms, which is exactly why the account should be yours. We only ever work inside a client’s own account.
We do the account structure, hints, creative and server-side tracking inside your account, and you keep all of it. Live in about a week.
Get my ads runningWhy do new accounts stall after signup?
Three reasons, in order of how often we see them.
- The bid is under the floor. Below roughly three dollars, delivery usually does not clear. You get no error, just almost no impressions, and it reads as "the channel is broken".
- Tracking was left for later. Without server-side conversions your cost per customer is wrong, so the first optimisation decision is made on bad numbers.
- Hints were written as keywords. "crm software" is not a conversation. It matches nothing well and everything badly.
Last verified 1 Sep 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; and our own live account.