How Do ChatGPT Ads Work, and What Should Your Agency Sell Beside Them?

ChatGPT ads are paid placements that appear below ChatGPT's answer for people on the Free and Go plans. Advertisers buy them by the view or by the click in OpenAI's Ads Manager, and they do not change the answer above them. So when a client asks whether to buy ChatGPT ads or to get named in ChatGPT's answers, the useful reply is that these are two different slots. Your agency can buy the first. The second is earned from what the web says about the client.

How do ChatGPT ads work?

OpenAI started testing ads in the United States on 9 February 2026. By 21 October 2026 it reported more than 100,000 advertisers and ads in 89 countries. One ad unit sits below a ChatGPT response, clearly labelled, with the advertiser's name, logo, a headline, a short description, an image and a landing page. OpenAI is also testing a multi-image ad that shows while ChatGPT creates an image.

There is no keyword list to bid on, as there is in search ads. The ads system reads the conversation's context and intent, the ad's landing page, title and copy, and the "context hints" the advertiser writes for each ad group. OpenAI says those hints guide matching, are not exact-match keywords and do not guarantee delivery. When several ads are eligible, a relevance-weighted second-price auction picks the one to show, so relevance counts alongside the bid.

Who sees ChatGPT ads, and who never does?

Ads may appear for people on the Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts see none, and neither do accounts identified as belonging to someone under 18. Temporary Chats show no ads. Ads are not placed near health, mental health or political conversations, and political advertising is not allowed. Free users can also switch to an ad-free mode with lower message limits.

For your clients, that means the audience is people using ChatGPT for free or on the low-cost plan. Many paying business users never see an ad at all. A client selling to companies whose staff all use a business plan should weigh that before moving budget.

How do you advertise on ChatGPT for a client?

The set-up runs through Ads Manager, which OpenAI still calls a beta.

1. Check the client's country. Self-service access depends on where the legal entity that advertises and pays is based.
2. Create the account and add your team. Ads Manager has settings for members, permissions, billing details and change logs. Keep the account in the client's name and add your team as members, the same rule as for any ad account.
3. Set the campaign. Choose the goal (views, clicks or conversions), the budget and the targeting. Geo-targeting and custom audiences are available.
4. Write ad groups with context hints. Describe the conversations, topics and needs where the client's offer is relevant, in plain words.
5. Add the ads and the tracking. Static UTM parameters on the landing page URL survive the click, so your existing analytics can see the traffic. The OpenAI Pixel and a Conversions API cover conversions.

OpenAI also offers an Ads Manager plugin that creates, edits and analyses campaigns from plain prompts inside ChatGPT. It speeds up set-up, and the copy still needs someone who knows the client.

OpenAI's availability page, read on 22 October 2026, lists each of these markets as open for self-service:

OpenAI says personalised ads are not available at first in the EEA or Switzerland. For clients in Ireland, the Netherlands and the rest of the EEA, write context hints with extra care, because the current conversation is the main signal those ads have.

How much do ChatGPT ads cost?

There is no fixed price. You set a maximum bid per ad group: a maximum cost per thousand views for reach campaigns, or a maximum cost per click for click campaigns. Conversion-optimised campaigns that bill by the click still charge for valid clicks, not for conversions. For click campaigns, OpenAI's own help page recommends starting with a maximum bid of US$3 to US$5 a click, and Ads Manager shows whether a bid looks strong enough to win.

For your reports, note that impressions, clicks and click-through rate refresh about every 15 minutes, while spend can lag by seven to eight hours, so a spend of zero in the morning does not mean nothing was charged. And Ads Manager reports impressions, clicks, spend, click-through rate, average cost per click, average cost per thousand views and conversions. Anything beyond that comes from your own analytics.

Do ChatGPT ads change what ChatGPT recommends?

No. OpenAI's help centre says advertisers have "no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT's responses", and that ads run on separate systems from the chat model. So the answer itself, where ChatGPT names businesses and links its sources, cannot be bought. It is earned the way search results are.

To see what earns it, on 22 October 2026 we put six buyer questions to ChatGPT, one run each, from the US, the UK, Australia and Canada. All six answers searched the web first. Between them they named 25 businesses or products and cited 50 sources. Thirty of those sources were the businesses' own websites. Eighteen were best-of lists, directories, review sites and Google listings.

What the check tells an agency

The pattern splits by kind of business. For the software, shoe and dental questions, ChatGPT took most of its facts from the pages of the businesses it named. For the plumber, all three sources were best-of lists, and the answer said its picks came from local listings and review signals. A plumber with a weak website and no place on those lists had no route into that answer.

The searches ChatGPT ran also tell you what to put on the page. Four of the six added the word "reviews" to the buyer's question. Others added fees, pricing, qualifications or specialties. A client page that states those facts in plain text gives the answer something to quote.

Are ChatGPT ads worth it for your clients?

For some clients, yes. Ads make sense when the client has a clear offer, a landing page that answers the question the conversation is about, and a way to measure what a click is worth. Online shops with product feeds, software with a free trial and services with a quick enquiry form fit that well. They make less sense for a client whose buyers mostly use paid business plans, or whose buyers ask about personal health, where ads are not placed. Health and financial advertisers also face strict eligibility checks, and political ads are not allowed.

Once you know how to advertise on ChatGPT, treat the first month as a test with a small budget. Keep the measurement plan simple, compare cost per enquiry with the client's other channels, and say clearly that the platform is still a beta.

What should your agency sell beside ChatGPT ads?

An agency that sells itself only as a ChatGPT ads agency leaves the answer slot to someone else. Sell that slot as its own service. The ad sits below the answer, and the check above shows what fills the answer: the client's own pages and the lists, directories and reviews ChatGPT reads. That work is search work, and it pays off in Google too.

• Make the client's pages quotable. Services, areas served, fees or price ranges, qualifications and opening hours, written as plain text on the page, never only inside an image or a PDF.
• Get the client onto the lists that get cited. Best-of lists and directories supplied many of the citations in the local answers, and for the plumber they were the only sources.
• Ask for reviews every month. Reviews appeared in most of the searches ChatGPT ran.
• Measure it the same way each month. Run the client's buyer questions through ChatGPT and record who is named and which sources are cited. The guide to what gets a page cited in ChatGPT's answers explains the method.

Sold together, the ads bring paid clicks from the first week, and the answer work builds a place in the answer that no ad budget can buy. If your agency runs the ads and wants a delivery partner for the answer side, white-label SEO for agencies covers that work under your agency's name, with the month's results sent to you in a spreadsheet for your own client report.