How to Run Ads on ChatGPT: Setup Guide, Ads Manager, and Waitlist Access

As of May 2026, running ads on ChatGPT no longer requires an agency relationship or a six-figure minimum. Here's the actual sign-up path, what you'll need to prepare, and what to expect in your first campaign.

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Step 1: Confirm you're eligible to advertise

ChatGPT ads only appear to logged-in adult users on the Free and ChatGPT Go tiers — Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education users don't see them at all. Before building a campaign, size your actual addressable audience: if your buyers skew toward paid ChatGPT tiers, your reach through ads is smaller than total ChatGPT usage would suggest.

OpenAI also restricts categories at launch: no ads are shown near health, mental health, or political conversations, and no ads target accounts OpenAI predicts belong to users under 18. If your product sits in a regulated or sensitive category, check current eligibility before you invest in creative.

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Step 2: Sign up

Two paths exist, depending on how you want to buy:

Self-serve (most ecommerce brands): Go to ads.openai.com and sign up for the self-serve Ads Manager beta directly. This is the path OpenAI opened to all US businesses starting May 2026, with no minimum spend requirement.

Through an agency or ad-tech partner: OpenAI has formal partnerships with agencies including Dentsu, Omnicom, Publicis, and WPP, and technology partners including Adobe, for teams that want to manage ChatGPT ads through tools and workflows they already use. If your team already runs paid media through one of these partners, ask your existing rep about ChatGPT ads access before setting up a separate self-serve account.

For general updates before you're ready to commit either way, openai.com/advertisers is OpenAI's own sign-up point for advertiser news.

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Step 3: Prepare your creative

Requirements are deliberately lean compared to Google or Meta:

• Merchant description: 40–80 words. This is doing more work than it looks like — since targeting is contextual rather than keyword-based, this description is effectively how OpenAI's system understands what your product is and when it's relevant.
• Square hero image: one image, no carousel or multi-format requirement at this stage.
• Category mapping: tagging your product/service into OpenAI's category taxonomy so it can be matched to relevant conversations.

There's no video format and no dynamic product feed integration yet, which is a real constraint if you're used to Google Shopping-style automated feeds — everything here is closer to a single static unit than a catalog-driven campaign, at least in this phase of the rollout.

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Step 4: Choose a bidding model

Three options exist as of mid-2026, added in roughly this order:

1. CPM — available since launch, priced as high as ~$60 at the invite-only February 2026 start, reported as low as ~$25 in some pilot categories by mid-2026.
2. CPC — added with the self-serve launch, starting around $3–5 per click.
3. CPA — activated June 5, 2026, turning ChatGPT Ads into a performance channel where you can bid toward a completed action rather than a click or impression.

For a first test, CPC is the lowest-commitment starting point: you're not paying for impressions that don't lead anywhere, and the per-click cost is transparent enough to set a real test budget against.

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Step 5: Set expectations for measurement

OpenAI has shipped a Conversions API and pixel-based measurement so you can tie post-click events back to the impression that drove them — standard infrastructure, but worth confirming your analytics stack can actually ingest it before launch, especially if your attribution setup already struggles with AI-referred traffic showing up as "Direct" in GA4. (If that sounds familiar, it's the same underlying problem we cover in Agentic Commerce Traffic)">Dark Agentic Commerce Traffic — AI surfaces in general are hard for legacy analytics to see correctly, and ad-driven traffic is not automatically exempt from that blind spot.)

Advertisers only receive aggregate performance data — impressions, clicks, spend — never the underlying conversation content. Build your measurement expectations around that constraint rather than assuming ChatGPT-level conversation insight the way you might get from a search-query report in Google Ads.

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What a reasonable first campaign looks like

• Budget: Small and time-boxed. No minimum spend means you can test with a few hundred dollars over a couple of weeks rather than committing to a quarter-long contract.
• Bidding: CPC to start, since it's the most directly comparable to what most teams already know from search advertising.
• Creative: One well-written 40-80 word merchant description per core product line, not per SKU — the format doesn't reward granularity the way a Shopping feed does.
• Category: Pick your single most evaluation-heavy product line first — the one where customers genuinely compare options — since that's the conversational moment ChatGPT ads are built to reach.
• Timeline: Treat the first 60-90 days as a learning phase. The platform itself is still evolving — CPA bidding only shipped in June 2026, and OpenAI's own updates describe this as an active pilot, not a mature, fully-documented ad system.

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If you'd rather not manage this yourself

Setting up and optimizing a new ad channel from scratch takes real time, and ChatGPT Ads is genuinely new enough that best practices are still forming in real time as OpenAI ships features. If you'd rather have someone who's already tracking the rollout run this for you, AI-Sponsored Placements is a service we offer specifically for this — we set up and manage paid placement across AI surfaces including ChatGPT, alongside the organic-visibility work most brands are already doing with us. Book a demo and we'll tell you honestly whether your category is ready for a ChatGPT ads test yet.

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