Remember when ChatGPT ads first landed in the US with a $200k entry ticket? Great news if you're a global retailer with money to burn. Less great if you're, well, most brands.
That's changed. OpenAI has started rolling out its self-serve Ads Manager Beta to UK businesses, and you can get going for as little as $25 a day. No six-figure commitment, no upfront billing details, no waiting for a call back. Just an account, a budget, and a(nother) new place to show up.
We’ve been sat patiently knowing this was coming. And we didn’t have to wait too long. waiting for it to feel real. This is that moment.
What are ChatGPT ads?
ChatGPT ads are adverts that appear directly underneath an LLM search response. When someone on ChatGPT's Free or Go tier asks a question, a sponsored placement can appear underneath the answer, clearly labelled as sponsored so nobody's left wondering what they're looking at.
A short headline, a line or two of description, and a small image, sitting apart from the actual response. If you're on Plus, Pro, Business, or Enterprise, you won't see them at all (which tells you exactly who OpenAI expects to be doing the clicking).
The idea isn’t that it interrupts your search journey or throws you off your trail of thought, but rather enhances the experience by subtly saying “hey, I found something relevant which might be of interest to this conversation”. And the answer itself doesn't change because of the ads. OpenAI's been clear that ads don't influence what ChatGPT actually says. The response stays the response. The ad just sits alongside it.
What does targeting look like?
This is the bit that'll feel unfamiliar, even to a seasoned PPC team.
There are no keywords to bid on. Rather than matching ads to search terms, ChatGPT matches them to the conversation someone's having, in real time. Advertisers give it "context hints", phrases describing the kinds of conversations their product or service fits into, and the platform does the matching from there.
So if someone's spent the week asking ChatGPT about home renovations and then asks which paint holds up best in a bathroom, a relevant brand can show up right at that moment. It's targeting based on intent within the conversation, not a demographic profile or a lookalike audience. There's no layered segmentation like you'd get on Meta - at least not yet. Which means success here comes down to how good your offer is and how well it fits the conversation, not how cleverly you've built your audiences.
Inside the Ads Manager
We've had a look at the new interface, and it's a fairly straightforward setup: four sections covering campaigns, tools, billing, and settings. Nothing that'll baffle anyone who's spent time in Google Ads or Meta Business Manager.
One thing worth flagging if you work with an agency (oh hi!): OpenAI is asking agencies and freelancers not to set up accounts on a client's behalf. Instead, the client creates their own account, and adds their agency partner with the right permissions. The agency accepts and can then switch between client accounts from within the platform.
The catch is there's no Google Ads-style Manager Account letting you view everything in one place. You can switch between client accounts, but each one has to be opened individually. A bit of extra admin, and hopefully something OpenAI tidies up as this platform matures.
The modern customer journey
It’s no secret that increasingly, your customers aren't always typing a search term and scrolling through ten blue links on Google any more. They're having an actual back-and-forth conversation with an LLM: asking follow-up questions, comparing options out loud, working through a decision the way they might with a knowledgeable friend rather than a search engine.
That changes the shape of the journey. A shopper might spend days chatting to ChatGPT about which running shoe suits their gait, or where to go on holiday within budget, all before they land on a single brand's website. By the time they do, they've usually already narrowed the field. They're not browsing anymore. They're deciding.
That's a valuable moment to be part of, and until now, brands couldn't buy their way into it unless they had deep pockets and a direct line to OpenAI.
Our take
We're not going to tell you to rip up your media plan and pour next quarter's budget into ChatGPT ads. There’s still plenty of development waiting to happen within the platform and it won’t totally revolutionise your performance marketing in one hit.
But this UK rollout is one of the clearest signs yet that OpenAI is building proper, scalable advertising infrastructure, not just running an experiment. And new channels are always cheapest and easiest to learn before everyone else piles in. Right now, competition for this inventory is low and the barrier to testing is small.
Spend the time in this early window getting familiar with the account setup, the workflows, and identify how your brand can actually show up inside ChatGPT conversations. That way, you’re ready when inventory, targeting, and measurement all mature.
A few things worth doing now, whether or not you're ready to spend:
- Open ChatGPT and ask it about your own business and your competitors. Are you being mentioned? Is what it's saying accurate?
- Get your account set up and have a poke around the Ads Manager dashboard, even before your first campaign goes live.
- Have the conversation with your board or senior stakeholders now, even if the spend comes later.
Looking for some support with this early testing? Our door is open! Reach out to our Head of Paid search, Jeremy, today.
