ChatGPT Ads Manager is OpenAI's self-serve platform for buying ads in ChatGPT. You sign up at ads.openai.com, set a budget and a bid, upload your ads, and track the results in one place. OpenAI opened it as a beta on May 5, 2026, after a pilot that ran from February through April, and it's still labelled beta today.
This guide covers who can use Ads Manager, how a campaign is put together, the ad specs, budgets and bids, and how an agency can get a client's sign-off on a ChatGPT ad before it runs.
Everything here comes from OpenAI's launch post and its Ads Manager help center, checked on October 26, 2026. OpenAI says the platform will keep changing during the beta, so check the linked pages before you launch.
What is ChatGPT Ads Manager?
Ads Manager is where you create an advertiser account, add billing, set budgets, bids and pacing, upload ads, run campaigns and see how they perform. Before it launched, ChatGPT ads were sold only through OpenAI's ads team and its partners.
Those partners still sell ChatGPT ads. They include agencies such as Dentsu, Omnicom, Publicis and WPP, and technology partners such as Adobe, Criteo, Kargo, Pacvue and StackAdapt. Ads Manager is the route for a business, or an agency running its clients' accounts, that wants to buy directly.
Who can use it, and who sees the ads
- Advertisers: self-service is open to businesses based in 89 countries, including the United States, according to OpenAI's Ads Manager Availability page. The legal entity that advertises and pays has to be based in a listed country. If yours isn't listed yet, you can still create an account and OpenAI will tell you when it opens.
- New accounts start at home: some new self-serve accounts can advertise only in their own country at first. They become eligible for other supported countries after identity verification and a required amount of spend at home.
- People who see ads: ads may appear for users on ChatGPT's Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts don't get ads, and neither do accounts OpenAI identifies as belonging to people under 18. Ad testing started in the United States on February 9, 2026.
What a ChatGPT ad looks like
Ads appear below ChatGPT's response, clearly labelled and separate from the answer. OpenAI says advertising doesn't influence ChatGPT's answers and advertisers don't get access to people's conversations.
Each ad has six parts:
- advertiser name
- favicon (your logo)
- title
- copy (the description)
- landing page
- image
To see an ad card with your own copy before you build anything, try the ChatGPT ads mockup generator.
How to set up a ChatGPT Ads Manager account
- Go to ads.openai.com and sign in with the OpenAI account you use for ChatGPT, or create one.
- Enter your website URL and let Ads Manager draft your first ad and campaign from it, or skip that step and go straight to Ads Manager.
- Enter your advertiser name and account details. Your country or region, currency and time zone can't be changed later.
- Set up billing. Campaigns don't deliver until billing is in place.
- In Settings, then General, add your logo and check your brand name. The brand name is what people see next to your ads, and changing it later sends your ads back for review.
- Complete account verification, then invite teammates as Admin, Member or Viewer.
Every ad goes through review. Once it's approved and the account, billing and campaign are ready, it can start running and spending, so pause the campaign if you're not ready to go live.
Running ads for clients? Create a separate advertiser account for each client. One OpenAI login can switch between all the accounts you belong to. Once you belong to 10 or more ad accounts you can't create another yourself, but a client's admin can still invite you to theirs.
How campaigns, ad groups and ads fit together
Ads Manager uses the same three levels as most ad platforms:
| Level | What you set |
|---|---|
| Campaign | Objective, budget, start and end dates, countries, and optionally platforms and custom audiences |
| Ad group | A theme, a maximum bid and context hints |
| Ad | Title, copy, image and landing page |
Objectives
- Views (CPM): you pay per 1,000 impressions.
- Clicks (CPC): you pay per valid click.
- Conversions: Ads Manager optimizes toward a conversion event you choose. You're billed per valid click (oCPC) or per 1,000 impressions (oCPM), never per conversion.
You can't switch an existing campaign to a different objective. Create a new campaign instead.
Context hints instead of keywords
ChatGPT ads don't use keywords. On each ad group you add context hints: plain phrases that describe what you offer, who it helps or when it's useful. OpenAI's example is "cushioned everyday running shoes for beginners training for their first 5K", which tells the system far more than "running shoes".
Context hints guide matching, but they aren't exact-match keywords, and they don't guarantee your ad shows in a particular conversation. The ads system also weighs the conversation itself, your title, copy and landing page and, where ads personalization is on, signals from the person's wider use of ChatGPT.
Targeting
- Countries, and for most campaign types, states or regions, cities, markets and postal codes where available. To run only in the US, include the United States. Excluding other countries isn't enough.
- Platforms: Android app, Android web, desktop web, iOS app and iOS web.
- Custom audiences to include or exclude. Including an audience needs at least 25,000 matched users.
ChatGPT ad specs
These come from OpenAI's bulk upload checklist:
| Field | OpenAI recommends | Maximum |
|---|---|---|
| Title | 16 to 24 characters | 50 characters |
| Copy | 32 to 48 characters | 100 characters |
| Image | Square PNG or JPG | 1200 x 1200 pixels |
An ad account can hold up to 5,000 ads. Landing pages must load, and they must not block OpenAI's crawlers, OAI-AdsBot and OAI-SearchBot.
OpenAI's creative advice in short:
- Write several distinct title and copy variations for each offer, each with a different angle.
- Lead with a specific benefit: what it is, who it's for and when it helps, rather than a slogan.
- Link to the most relevant product or content page, not your homepage.
- Keep images simple and matched to the title and copy.
Budgets and bids
- Minimum daily budget: 25 USD for accounts billed in US dollars. It varies by billing currency, for example 15 EUR, 15 GBP, 25 CAD or 25 AUD.
- Daily or campaign-total budget: a daily budget is an average across a Sunday-to-Saturday week. One day can spend up to twice the daily amount, and the week can't go over seven times it. A campaign-total budget caps spend across the whole flight instead. OpenAI suggests new advertisers start with a daily budget.
- Bids: you set a maximum bid on each ad group. For Clicks campaigns, OpenAI recommends starting with a maximum CPC of 3 to 5 USD. Ads compete in a relevance-weighted, second-price auction.
Measuring results
Ads Manager reports impressions, clicks, spend, CTR, average CPC, average CPM and conversions, as tables, charts and CSV downloads. Impressions, clicks and CTR refresh about every 15 minutes. Spend can lag 7 to 8 hours, so a zero doesn't mean nothing has been charged.
To track conversions, set up OpenAI's pixel or Conversions API. You can also add UTM parameters to each ad's landing page URL and read the traffic in the analytics tools you already use.
Bulk upload
For more than a handful of ads, Ads Manager takes a bulk upload: a campaign workbook with tabs for campaigns, ad groups and ads. Bulk upload doesn't create product-feed campaigns yet. Retailers set those up from a product feed inside Ads Manager.
Get the client's sign-off before the ad runs
Ads Manager is built for running ads, not for showing a client a draft. If you manage ChatGPT ads for clients, they'll want to see the ad first, and a spreadsheet of titles and copy doesn't show them much.
In PPC Ad Editor you can:
- Build the ChatGPT ad card with the client's name, logo, title, copy, image and landing page, plus the context hints for each ad group. PPC Ad Editor keeps titles to 24 characters and copy to 48, the top of OpenAI's recommended ranges.
- Send one link. The client opens it in a browser with no account, comments on the exact field they mean, and approves with their name.
- Export the Ads Manager workbook and upload it to Ads Manager yourself.
The video above walks through all three with an example store. To see a card first, start with the ChatGPT ads mockup generator.
ChatGPT Ads Manager FAQ
Is ChatGPT Ads Manager available in my country?
Self-service is open to businesses based in 89 countries, including the United States, as of late October 2026. Check OpenAI's Ads Manager Availability page for the current list.
How much does it cost to advertise in ChatGPT?
You pay per 1,000 impressions or per valid click, depending on the objective and billing method. The minimum daily budget is 25 USD for accounts billed in US dollars, and OpenAI suggests starting CPC bids at 3 to 5 USD.
Can I use keywords for ChatGPT ads?
No. You add context hints to each ad group instead. They describe when your ad is relevant, but they aren't exact-match keywords and don't guarantee delivery.
Who sees ChatGPT ads?
People on ChatGPT's Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts don't see ads, and neither do accounts identified as belonging to people under 18.
What are the ChatGPT ad character limits?
A title can be up to 50 characters and the copy up to 100. OpenAI recommends 16 to 24 characters for titles and 32 to 48 for copy.