In short:
- On 18 August 2026 OpenAI announced ChatGPT Ads expanding to 31 European markets. The English announcement says "next week"; the Czech version of the same page names 24 August 2026.
- Ads are shown only to users on the Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts do not see them, and neither do accounts identified as under 18.
- At launch you buy through the OpenAI Ads Solutions team and partners. On 20 August 2026 the official availability table listed self-service Ads Manager in nine countries outside the EU and EEA — no European country was on it.
- The official location catalogue OpenAI offers for download lists 41 countries, 32 of them European.
- Personalised ads are not initially available in the EEA or Switzerland, so in Europe ad selection leans on the context of the current conversation.
- No crawlable landing page, no ads. Pages OpenAI cannot review are not eligible to run.
A new channel nobody has data on yet
When someone wants to buy a vacuum cleaner, a sofa or a birthday present today, they increasingly don't start at a search engine. They describe to ChatGPT what they need, what constrains them and what matters to them — and ask for advice. OpenAI itself describes ChatGPT as the place "where decisions take shape".
Advertising is now entering those decisions. OpenAI began testing ads in ChatGPT in the United States on 9 February 2026, expanded to eight more markets over six months, and on 18 August 2026 announced its largest expansion so far: 31 European countries.
This article tries to separate what is verifiable from what is enthusiastic guesswork. Everything below comes from OpenAI's own announcements, its advertiser help centre, its ad policies and its official location catalogue. Nothing is extrapolated. Where OpenAI has not published something, the article says so.
What OpenAI actually announced
The 18 August 2026 announcement says ChatGPT Ads will expand to 31 European countries and names nine of them: Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Austria. The full list of all 31 is not in the announcement.
More informative is the official location catalogue OpenAI offers for download inside its campaign creation help article. As of 20 August 2026 it contained 41 countries, 32 of them European. The United Kingdom appears in the availability table as already live and is not named in the European expansion announcement — which leaves exactly 31 further European countries, matching the number in the announcement. The catalogue also goes well below country level: 767 regions, 210 TV regions and over 461,000 postal codes across all markets.
One caveat worth stating plainly: being in the catalogue does not mean every level is immediately usable. The help centre describes campaign-level country targeting and explicitly mentions state, designated market area and ZIP targeting in the United States, adding that location availability varies by country and should be confirmed in the location picker during campaign setup.
How you can buy. Initially through the OpenAI Ads Solutions team, agency partners and technology partners. The May 2026 announcement named agency partners Dentsu, Omnicom, Publicis and WPP, and technology partners including Adobe, Criteo, Kargo, Pacvue and StackAdapt. Self-service Ads Manager is said to follow "later this summer". The official availability table on 20 August 2026 listed nine countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. No EU or EEA country was on it yet.
Who actually sees the ads
Keep this number close when you plan a budget: according to OpenAI's help centre, ads may appear only to users on the Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts do not have ads and will not get them.
Further limits OpenAI states:
- Ads are not shown to accounts identified as belonging to people under 18, based on account-level age information and age prediction where available.
- Temporary Chats show no ads.
- During the test, ads do not appear in the ChatGPT Atlas browser.
- A user on the Free plan can switch to an ads-free experience in exchange for lower message limits and reduced feature access.
- Ads are not eligible to appear near sensitive or regulated topics, including personal health, mental health and politics.
And one sentence OpenAI repeats in every document: ads do not influence ChatGPT's answers. The ads system runs separately from the chat model, and advertisers have no ability to shape, rank or alter responses. Ads appear below the end of a response, clearly labelled as sponsored and visually separated.
One more line matters for European advertisers: personalised ads are not initially available in the European Economic Area or Switzerland. In practice that means ad selection in Europe leans mainly on the context of the current conversation rather than chat history and memory. That cuts both ways — less targeting signal, but also far less to explain in a privacy review.
Three ways to buy, one auction
The format is simple and well documented. Every ad contains the advertiser name, a favicon, a title, body copy, a landing page and an image.
| CPM | CPC | oCPC | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you pay for | 1,000 impressions | a valid click | a valid click |
| What is optimised | reach and exposure | clicks | your chosen conversion event |
| When it makes sense | maximum visibility | driving people to the site | pushing them to purchase |
Winners are picked by a relevance-weighted second-price auction. You set a maximum bid at ad group level; for click campaigns OpenAI recommends starting at $3–$5 per click. For conversion campaigns (oCPC) the bid is conversion-oriented — the system derives a per-click auction bid from it — but you are still billed per click, not per conversion.
A few operational details worth knowing before you build your first campaign:
- You cannot change a campaign objective after creation. Nor the conversion event on an oCPC campaign. Different goal? New campaign.
- A campaign-total budget is a spending cap, not a pacing control. OpenAI explicitly warns that spend is not distributed evenly across the campaign dates and can accumulate quickly when your ads match well. It recommends starting with a daily budget.
- Budget type changes are not always reversible — campaign-total to daily works, back does not.
- You can also target by platform: iOS app, Android app, or web (desktop and mobile web).
Minimum daily budgets vary by the billing currency of the ad account. OpenAI has published values for ten countries — including $25 for the US and £15 for the UK, the only European entry. No euro-area figure has been published as of this article, and there is no point guessing one.
Context hints are not keywords
This is where ChatGPT Ads differ most from keyword-based systems.
At ad group level you supply context hints — a description of the conversations, topics or terms where your product may be relevant. OpenAI states plainly that these are not exact-match keywords and do not guarantee delivery in specific conversations. The system combines them with the context and intent of the current conversation, the landing page, the title and the copy.
That leads to advice OpenAI gives directly, and it matters for retail: build for coverage, not one perfect message. More title and copy variations per offering give the system more chances to find a conversation where you fit. And each variation should introduce a different angle, not restate the same one.
The same logic applies to destinations: link to the most relevant page — a product page or a collection, not the homepage by default.
What you may and may not advertise
OpenAI's ad policies (v1.4, updated 10 August 2026) are deliberately narrow in this early phase. Allowed categories are mainly:
- household and consumer goods,
- local services,
- travel and experiences,
- digital products and education.
"All other categories are disallowed at launch," OpenAI writes. The points most likely to affect a retailer:
- Alcohol and tobacco — disallowed, including beverages above 0.5% ABV, cigarettes, vaping and nicotine products.
- Dietary supplements — those widely sold through major retailers may be permitted if they make no health claims. Diet pills, detox programmes and supplements marketed with unsupported health claims are not.
- Health products and services outside the US — generally prohibited. General wellness and fitness goods without medical claims may be permitted.
- Financial services outside the US — generally prohibited. Tools that do not themselves offer a financial product (budgeting apps, courses) generally are permitted.
- Gambling — disallowed, except lodging and entertainment where gambling is not the focus.
- CBD — non-intoxicating hemp-derived products with no THC may be permitted; THC products are not.
- Lingerie, underwear and swimwear — allowed in a standard fashion or retail context, not when framed to provoke sexual arousal.
- Counterfeits, individual job or property listings, legal services, political content — disallowed.
Review covers all elements together — copy, image and landing page. OpenAI explicitly states that an approved creative may not link to a destination that introduces disallowed content; its own example is a food delivery ad linking to alcohol delivery.
Most reviews run through automated systems — OpenAI says it uses LLMs and classifiers with human oversight, and adds advertiser verification and manual review in sensitive categories. And the line that matters most operationally: ads and landing pages that cannot be reviewed by its systems are not eligible to run.
The technical condition most people forget
This is the part marketing summaries skip, and it is decided by engineering, not marketing.
OpenAI uses a crawler called OAI-AdsBot to validate that the landing page complies with its policies — and it also uses page content to decide when the ad is relevant. Without a crawlable page, the ad is not approved.
The advertiser guidance names four layers that typically break it:
- robots.txt — the crawler respects the rules; if a path is disallowed, crawling stops immediately. OpenAI's own example:
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: OAI-AdsBot
Allow: /
- Web protection and bot mitigation — Cloudflare, Akamai and similar services return 403 to legitimate crawlers. OpenAI notes that OAI-AdsBot is officially verified and allowlisted by Cloudflare.
- Human verification — CAPTCHAs, JavaScript challenges, behavioural analysis. An automated system will not pass them.
- Rate limiting — bulk ad uploads can trigger throttling; look for 429 responses.
If your infrastructure requires a stable list of IP ranges, OpenAI publishes openai.com/searchbot.json and openai.com/adsbot.json — though it recommends relying on user-agent identification and provider verification programmes instead.
One more practical note from the guidance: the destination should be a directly reachable web page. App-store links, deep links, documents or destinations requiring an app, a login or region-specific access may not provide enough crawlable content for review.
Measurement: what you get and what you don't
Ads Manager reporting currently includes impressions, clicks, spend, click-through rate, average CPC, average CPM and conversions.
Conversions are measured two ways, and they combine: a browser measurement pixel and a server-side Conversions API. The pixel supports standard events any retailer will recognise — among them page_viewed, contents_viewed, items_added, checkout_started and order_created, plus lead_created, registration_completed, subscription_created and trial_started. If you send the same conversion through both paths, reuse the same event ID so OpenAI deduplicates it.
You can also add your own UTM parameters to destination URLs — they persist on ad clicks, so traffic from ChatGPT Ads shows up in your own analytics. For the first months of a new channel that is the cheapest way to form an independent view.
What you cannot get is the conversation. Advertisers do not see chats, chat history, memories or personal details — only aggregated, non-identifying performance reporting.
Editor's take — Michal Baloun, co-founder
The more interesting sentence in OpenAI's help centre is not about pricing. It is this: page content is used to decide when the ad is relevant. That is a different world from keywords. You don't declare what you want to attach to — you describe a situation, and the system matches your page to it. A product page with two sentences of description and a spec table won't get a shot even after you pay.
Second thing we see repeatedly in stores, and it bites fast here: a landing page blocked by bot protection. Plenty of shops run Cloudflare rules nobody in marketing knows about, because they only affect automated traffic. Search engines don't care. Here it is a condition of approval — and the failure surfaces as "the ad wasn't approved", not as "the firewall is blocking a crawler".
Third: let's not repeat the early performance-marketing mistake of judging a new channel by return on ad spend just because nothing else was at hand. A channel that catches people mid-decision brings different orders than remarketing — a different average order value, a different return rate, a different product mix. Whether it pays off shows up in margin after cost of goods, shipping and returns. Not in revenue.
How to work out whether it pays
Before you send the first unit of currency, you need one number: the return on ad spend at which you break even. The formula is one division — 100 divided by your net margin in percent.
A worked example (illustrative numbers, not measured): a store with a 20% net margin breaks even at a return of 5.0. At 30% margin, 3.3 is enough. The gap between those two stores is enormous, and both can show identical revenue.
A sensible sequence for a new channel with no history:
- Work out your net margin over the last 90 days — revenue minus cost of goods, shipping, marketing and operating costs.
- Derive your break-even point and a healthy level above it (a 20% buffer is a common rule of thumb).
- Tag destination URLs with UTM parameters so you have measurement independent of platform reporting.
- Record the spend as a cost in your profitability view — otherwise the new channel inflates revenue and margin mysteriously drops.
- Evaluate per product, not in aggregate. A channel aimed at the decision stage often pulls a different mix than you expect.
Here's what advice from Margly looks like
Margly does not have a ChatGPT Ads integration yet — you enter the spend manually in the Costs module, the same as for any platform without a connector. What Margly can do before you spend anything:
- A break-even point from your data, not an estimate. Margly computes break-even return on ad spend from net margin after cost of goods, logistics, marketing and operating costs — not from gross margin, which systematically understates the bar.
- Per-product profitability. Before you decide which products go into a new channel, it helps to know which ones carry margin and which only carry revenue.
- All costs in one calculation. Manually entered spend feeds the same net margin calculation as connected channels, so a new channel doesn't distort the overall picture.
None of those numbers is an estimate — they all come from your own orders, cost prices and costs.
What to do this week
Whether you plan to advertise now or in six months, these four are worth doing today — and three of them help outside ChatGPT too:
- Check robots.txt. Allow
OAI-AdsBotandOAI-SearchBot. It takes five minutes and it is a hard requirement. - Verify your landing pages answer an automated client. Fetch one of your own product pages without a browser. A 403 or a CAPTCHA means you have a problem before you start.
- Read the ad policies against your catalogue. Alcohol, supplements with health claims, THC or financial services mean this channel isn't for you yet.
- Know your break-even point. When self-service Ads Manager opens in Europe, that's one decision already made.
You can register interest at ads.openai.com. And the honest summary of everything else: what ChatGPT Ads will actually deliver for European retailers is not known yet — the first real data will come out of European traffic. Until then it is fair to talk about what is verified and leave the rest to measurement.
Frequently asked questions
When will ChatGPT Ads be available in Europe?
OpenAI announced the expansion on 18 August 2026. The English version of the announcement says ads will expand "next week"; the Czech version of the same page names 24 August 2026, covering 31 European countries.
Initially ads can be bought through the OpenAI Ads Solutions team, agency partners and technology partners. Self-service access through Ads Manager is said to follow later in the summer.
Does every ChatGPT user see ads?
No. According to OpenAI's help centre, ads may appear for users on the Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts do not have ads.
OpenAI also does not show ads to accounts identified as belonging to people under 18. Ads do not appear in Temporary Chats and, during the test, not in the ChatGPT Atlas browser either. A user on the Free plan can also switch to an ads-free experience in exchange for lower message limits.
Which European countries can I target?
The announcement names nine of the 31 European countries: Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Austria. The full list is not published there.
The official location catalogue OpenAI offers for download in its campaign help article contained 41 countries on 20 August 2026, 32 of them European. Note that presence in the catalogue does not guarantee every targeting level is usable — the help centre says location availability varies by country and should be confirmed in the location picker.
How much do ChatGPT Ads cost?
You can buy on a cost per thousand impressions (CPM), cost per click (CPC) or conversion-optimised cost per click (oCPC) basis. Winners are chosen by a relevance-weighted second-price auction.
For click campaigns OpenAI recommends starting with a maximum bid of $3–$5 per click. Minimum daily budgets vary by the billing currency of the ad account; OpenAI has published values for ten countries, and the United Kingdom (£15) is the only European one among them. No euro-area figure has been published as of this article.
What can't be advertised in ChatGPT?
During the early phase the allowed categories are mainly household and consumer goods, local services, travel and entertainment, and digital products and education.
Disallowed categories include alcohol above 0.5% ABV and tobacco, gambling, adult content, recreational drugs including THC, counterfeits, political content, legal services, and ads for individual job or property listings. Financial and health services outside the US are generally prohibited, and dietary supplements are only permitted without unsupported health claims.
What has to work on my website before I can advertise?
The landing page must be reachable by the OAI-AdsBot crawler, which OpenAI uses to check that the ad and the page comply with its policies — and whose content it also uses to decide when the ad is relevant.
You have to allow it in robots.txt, and it must not be blocked by your firewall, CDN, bot mitigation, CAPTCHA or rate limiting. OpenAI also recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot. Pages that cannot be reviewed are not eligible to run, and the guidance warns explicitly against relying on a manual bypass.
Do ads influence ChatGPT's answers?
No. OpenAI states that ads run on systems separate from the chat model and that advertisers have no ability to shape, rank or alter responses.
Ads appear below the end of a response, clearly labelled as sponsored and visually separated. OpenAI also stresses that seeing an ad does not mean it endorses or recommends the advertiser.
How do I know what ChatGPT Ads brought me?
Ads Manager reporting includes impressions, clicks, spend, click-through rate, average CPC and CPM, and conversions. Conversions are measured with the browser pixel, the server-side Conversions API, or both — when you combine them, reuse the same event ID so a conversion isn't counted twice.
Independently of that, add your own UTM parameters to destination URLs: they persist on ad clicks, so the traffic shows up in your own analytics. Whatever you do, record the spend as a cost in your margin calculation — otherwise the new channel inflates revenue and profitability drops for no visible reason.
Sources:
- OpenAI — ChatGPT Ads expands across Europe (18 Aug 2026)
- OpenAI — New ways to buy ChatGPT ads (5 May 2026)
- OpenAI Help Center — Ads in ChatGPT
- OpenAI Help Center — Ads in ChatGPT: The Basics
- OpenAI Help Center — Create Campaigns for ChatGPT Ads
- OpenAI Help Center — Create Ads for ChatGPT Ads
- OpenAI Help Center — Conversion-optimized Campaigns
- OpenAI Help Center — Ads Manager Availability
- OpenAI Help Center — Advertiser Guidance for Allowing OpenAI Web Crawlers
- OpenAI — Ad policies (updated 10 Aug 2026)
- OpenAI Developers — Measurement Pixel
- OpenAI Ads — ads.openai.com
ChatGPT, OpenAI and GPT are trademarks of OpenAI. This is an independent editorial article, not produced in cooperation with OpenAI or with its endorsement.