Self-service ChatGPT advertising opened across Europe on 31 August 2026. We got into Ads Manager and went through campaign setup to see what the channel actually offers — the targeting model, the creative limits, and the one restriction that changes the picture for European advertisers.
TheAdsWatcher does not track ChatGPT ads yet. It is on our roadmap. Leave your email and we will tell you the day it goes live.
This is the part that surprises everyone arriving from Google Ads. There is no keyword list, no match types, no negative keywords and no keyword-level bidding. The entire targeting surface at ad group level is a free-text field called contextual hints.
You describe the conversations, topics or terms where your product or service may be relevant. Ads Manager is explicit that these hints guide matching and are not exact targeting rules.
You are writing a brief for a matching system, not building a keyword list. That means the usual levers — tightening match types, pruning search terms, bidding a head term harder — do not exist. What you control is how well you describe the moment your product belongs in, and the creative that shows up when the system agrees.
OpenAI's help centre spells out what the ads system weighs when it picks an ad: the context and intent of the current conversation, the ad's landing page, headline and copy, the advertiser's context hints and targeting selections, and — only where ads personalization is on — signals from the user's wider ChatGPT use. Between eligible ads, relevance and bid decide the order. Your landing page and creative are matching inputs, not just what shows after the match.
If you advertise in Europe
Ads Manager shows a notice on the campaign screen when you target European locations: custom audiences are not supported for campaigns aimed at the EEA or Switzerland, because personalized ads are not available there yet. OpenAI's help centre now says the same to users: personalized ads are "not initially available" in the EEA or Switzerland.
ChatGPT's own ads notice to European users puts it plainly — "personalized ads aren't available in your region yet" — and lists the three things that shape an ad there: the topic of the current chat, basic information about the device, and general location where applicable. That is the entire targeting surface on the user's side.
You can upload emails and phone numbers, but they will not work as an audience filter on European campaigns.
Nothing carries over from a previous visit. Every impression is decided by the conversation happening right then.
In Europe your hints and your creative are the only levers you have. Everything rests on describing the moment well.
The hierarchy is campaign → ad group → ad, the same shape as Google Ads, so the structure will feel familiar even though the targeting underneath it does not.
Three: reach, clicks, conversions. The objective decides how you bid in the auction and which ad formats you can run.
Either automated — the platform adjusts your bid to get the most results for your budget — or a manual maximum CPC you set yourself.
A daily budget or a total campaign budget. Set at campaign level, not per ad group.
iOS app, Android app and web, selectable individually. There is no separate mobile-versus-desktop bid adjustment.
An include list and a separate exclude list, so you can run a country while carving out a region inside it.
Landing-page URL parameters accept campaign, ad group, ad and ad account ID templates, so attribution lands in your own analytics.
The ad unit is compact: your logo, your brand name, an ad label, one headline and one line of description. Write for truncation — Ads Manager warns that headlines can be shortened in some placements.
It appears below the end of a ChatGPT response, labelled as sponsored and visually separated from the answer. OpenAI says a response can carry one or more ad units, and a unit can hold several items from one advertiser or ads from several advertisers — so you may be sharing the slot.
Headline
50 characters
Description
100 characters
Image
PNG or JPG, square, min. 256 × 256 px
Image required
Yes — an ad cannot be saved without one
Account logo
Required before any ad serves
One default worth checking before you launch: automatic text adaptation is switched on out of the box. It generates adapted and translated versions of your headline and description that can serve without your review or approval. If your copy is bound by brand or legal constraints, turn it off.
OpenAI began testing ads in ChatGPT with a US pilot in February 2026 and announced the European expansion on 18 August, covering 31 European countries. By the end of August the channel had reached over 40 countries and a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate in under 200 days, against an audience OpenAI puts at more than 1 billion weekly ChatGPT users. On 3 September OpenAI told advertisers that ads are now serving in select countries across Europe, India, the Middle East and North Africa. Slovakia is one of them: on 4 September a Free account here received ChatGPT's ads notice and, on its first purchase question, a live ad with copy auto-localised into Slovak.
Ads are shown only to people on the Free and Go plans — Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts stay ad-free. OpenAI also keeps ads away from accounts it judges to be under 18, from Temporary Chats, from the Atlas browser during the test, and from any conversation touching personal health, mental health or politics. Free users can opt out of ads altogether in exchange for lower message limits.
OpenAI lists self-service access through Ads Manager in 52 countries, 32 of them in Europe.
Availability changes as OpenAI expands. Last checked 3 September 2026 — if your country is not listed, you can still create an account and OpenAI will notify you when self-service opens there.
3 September 2026 — from OpenAI's advertiser product update
OpenAI emails advertisers a weekly product update. These are OpenAI's own words, not something we have re-verified inside Ads Manager yet — we will fold the ones that matter to a European advertiser in here between full walk-throughs.
Companies buying ChatGPT ads are almost always running the same offers on Meta and Google. That is where TheAdsWatcher works today:
You pick weekly or monthly when you set a watcher up, and at the end of each interval you get a report listing the new ads found in that period. It is a scheduled report rather than a live alert — a competitor's new ad reaches you at the next check, not the moment it goes live.
With contextual hints, not keywords. You describe in plain language the conversations, topics or terms where your product is relevant, and those hints guide which conversations your ad is matched to. Ads Manager states outright that they are not exact targeting rules — there are no match types, no negative keywords and no keyword-level bids.
No. Ads Manager states that custom audiences are not supported for campaigns targeting the EEA or Switzerland, because personalized ads are not available there yet. You can still upload customer lists, but they will not apply to European targeting. OpenAI's 3 September update confirms a 25,000 matched-user minimum for audience targeting — smaller lists can now be used for exclusions only — and adds Google Advertising ID as a supported identifier. The update said nothing about lifting the EEA/Switzerland restriction itself.
A 50-character headline and a 100-character description, plus a square image of at least 256 × 256 px in PNG or JPG. The image is mandatory. Your account logo appears in the ad unit, and ads must be labelled as ads.
Not yet. Today we cover Meta, Facebook, Instagram and Google Ads. ChatGPT Ads is on our roadmap — join the waitlist above and we will email you the day it is live.
Through OpenAI, not through TheAdsWatcher. You sign up at ads.openai.com and build campaigns in Ads Manager, or go through the OpenAI Ads Solutions team for larger budgets. We are a competitor monitoring tool, not an ad buying platform.
No. Ads are shown only to people on the Free and Go plans; Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts are ad-free, so buyers on those plans sit outside this channel entirely. OpenAI also withholds ads from accounts it identifies as under 18, from Temporary Chats and, during the test, from its Atlas browser. Free users can switch to an ads-free mode in exchange for lower usage limits. Logged-out visitors do see ads, limited to creative suitable for all audiences.
Most can, with two limits. OpenAI does not allow political advertising in ChatGPT at all, and advertisers in sensitive or regulated categories such as health and financial services must meet its eligibility criteria before they can run. Separately, no ad is placed next to a conversation about personal health, mental health or politics, whichever advertiser it is — those conversations are simply not inventory.
Aggregated performance only — views and clicks in Ads Manager, plus whatever your own Measurement Pixel or Conversions API records on your side. OpenAI states that advertisers never receive chats, chat history, memories, names, emails, precise location or IP addresses. Users can see why an ad was shown, hide it or report it, and if someone messages you through an ad you see only the messages they send you.
Treat it as a test line rather than a reallocation. Public benchmarks are still thin, so the useful move is a small budget aimed at learning which creative and messaging work there before the auction fills up.
The targeting model, campaign settings, creative limits and the EEA restriction come from walking through campaign setup in OpenAI Ads Manager on 1 September 2026. Dates, country counts and revenue figures come from OpenAI's own announcements, last checked 3 September 2026. Product changes after that date come from OpenAI's weekly advertiser product-update emails, most recently 3 September 2026. Who sees ads, where they do not appear, how ads are selected and what advertisers receive come from OpenAI's help-centre article on ads in ChatGPT, read 4 September 2026, and from the ads notice and first live ad ChatGPT itself showed a Slovak Free account the same day:
Ads Manager is in beta and changing quickly. If something here no longer matches what you see, the product is right and we are out of date.
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