How to Buy Ads on ChatGPT: From Account to First Campaign

Buying ads on ChatGPT is now a self-serve process any business can complete in an afternoon: create an account at ads.openai.com, pass verification, add postpay billing, and launch from a $25 daily budget. The mechanics differ from Google in almost every step - no keywords, no upfront payment, one ad per conversation. Here is the full buying process, in order.

Who can buy ChatGPT ads right now

OpenAI began testing ads in ChatGPT in the US on February 9, 2026, and opened the self-serve Ads Manager Beta in May 2026. The early gatekeeping is gone: at the February launch, pricing was $60 CPM with a $200,000 minimum commitment. Both have since been dropped. Today any verified business can buy, starting at $25 per day.

Availability by market: the US, then the UK from June 6, 2026 - OpenAI's first European market - plus Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Korea (OpenAI expansion posts, 2026). India switched on ads on August 27, 2026, with 50+ brands live in the first week through agency partners WPP and Omnicom; self-serve opens to any Indian business on September 4, 2026 at a ₹725 minimum daily budget (The Hindu BusinessLine, Aug 28, 2026; Storyboard18, 2026). Agencies are not required anywhere - self-serve is open to all merchants.

One scope note before you spend: ads appear only to logged-in adults on the Free and Go tiers. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education users never see ads (OpenAI). You are buying reach into the free audience only.

Step 1: create and verify your account

Go to ads.openai.com and sign up. This is not an instant-on ad account - OpenAI verifies who is advertising before anything serves. You will need:

• Business details - legal name and address.
• Tax ID - required for the postpay invoicing relationship.
• A billing method on file.
• Persona identity verification - the same third-party identity check used across fintech onboarding.
• An account logo - this renders on every ad (the favicon displays at 32×32), so upload a clean square mark, not a wordmark screenshot.

Complete all five before building campaigns. Ads will not serve from a partially verified account, and creative review is faster when the account identity is already settled.

Step 2: understand postpay billing

ChatGPT ads bill postpay: you accrue spend against your budget and OpenAI charges your billing method afterward, rather than requiring prepaid credits. Practical implications:

• No upfront deposit. Combined with no minimum lifetime spend, your real commitment is the $25/day budget on whatever you run.
• Your billing method must clear. A failed postpay charge pauses delivery, so use a card or account with sufficient headroom.
• Budget caps are your spend control. Since payment happens after delivery, the daily budget is the lever that bounds exposure. Start at or near the minimum until you have seen a week of data.

Step 3: choose a campaign objective - Clicks or Reach

Ads Manager offers two campaign objectives, and the choice sets your bid model:

• Clicks - CPC billing, for traffic and conversion goals. There is also a conversion-optimized CPC variant: OpenAI optimizes delivery toward your selected conversion event but still charges per click (OpenAI Help Center, "Create campaigns for ChatGPT"). If you want purchases, this is the one - but it needs conversion tracking live first. Our conversion tracking setup guide covers the OpenAI pixel and Conversions API.
• Reach - CPM billing, for awareness. CPM options run roughly $25-60 (WebFX; practitioner reports, 2026).

For a first ecommerce campaign, we recommend Clicks. The audience already converts unusually well when it arrives organically - ChatGPT-referred ecommerce traffic converts at 15.9% vs 1.76% for Google organic (Adobe, 2025) - so paying for clicks, not impressions, keeps the test honest.

Set your daily budget at campaign level. Minimum: $25.

Step 4: build ad groups - context hints and bidding

This is where ChatGPT ads stop resembling search ads. There are no keywords. Matching is conversational: the current conversation topic, the user's past chats, and their past ad interactions. You steer matching with context hints - OpenAI recommends 5-15 discrete, 1-2-sentence descriptions of the buyer moments you want per ad group. Hints guide matching; they are not exact-match rules. We wrote a full playbook on writing them in our context hints targeting guide.

Bidding. Choose Maximize results (automated) or Manual Max CPC. The auction is a relevance-weighted second-price auction - a higher bid does not beat a more relevant ad. Typical 2026 starting bids are $3-5 CPC, rising to $8-18 in software and finance categories (WebFX; OpenAI docs, 2026).

Targeting. Geography goes down to country, region, DMA, and postal code, and you can apply custom audiences with bid multipliers. There are no demographic profiles for sale - OpenAI does not sell user data to advertisers, and conversations are kept private from them (OpenAI, 2026).

Step 5: build the creative

The ad unit is a single labeled sponsored box below ChatGPT's answer, and only one advertiser appears per matched conversation. The specs:

• Advertiser name and logo (favicon renders at 32×32)
• Title - up to 50 characters
• Description - up to 100 characters
• Square image - at least 256×256
• Destination link

That is 150 characters of copy total, so write the title as the buyer's outcome and the description as the one proof point. If you sell a catalog rather than a single offer, consider product feed ads, launched June 2026: upload a Google Shopping-format catalog and ChatGPT auto-generates product ads - 100 SKU minimum, up to 1M SKUs (OpenAI Ads Manager docs; Digiday, June 2026).

Step 6: submit for review - then expect a slow ramp

Submit the campaign and OpenAI reviews the creative and account before serving. Once live, do not judge the campaign in 48 hours: delivery ramps slowly during the beta by design (OpenAI onboarding). Benchmarks to calibrate against - chatbot ad CTR runs around 0.9% versus a ~6.4% Google search benchmark (eMarketer, 2026); in our own US campaigns running since July 2026, CTR has averaged ~1.3% (our campaign data). Agencies still report measurement gaps and unproven outcomes (eMarketer/Digiday, 2026), which is exactly why tracking belongs in place before the first dollar.

For the click-by-click walkthrough of the Ads Manager interface itself, see our deeper setup guide, and for what the placements cost across categories, our breakdown of how ChatGPT ads work and what they cost. Everything in this cluster is indexed on our ChatGPT Ads hub.

Where Tru Commerce fits

Buying the ad is the easy half. As Viren put it in The Hindu BusinessLine (Aug 28, 2026): "Brands cannot buy influence over ChatGPT's answers." Your brand now competes on two layers - the organic recommendation, which is earned, and the sponsored placement, which is bought and labelled. And remember who sees which: paying Plus and Pro subscribers - often your highest-intent shoppers - see only the earned layer. Every dollar of ad spend rents a conversation your organic presence should be winning outright.

Before you fund a campaign, find out whether ChatGPT already recommends you. Run the free Citation Rank scan - see where your brand ranks across AI surfaces in 24 hours, then decide how much of the conversation you want to rent versus own.