ChatGPT ads are moving fast. Here’s where things actually stand.
Quick recap if you’re catching up: OpenAI launched ads inside ChatGPT on 9th Feb - US only (for now), for free and Go tier users, priced at $60 CPM with a $200k minimum spend. Around 600+ brands were in the managed pilot (Target, Adobe, Best Buy, to name a handful). Ads appear below the response, clearly labelled as sponsored and don’t influence the answer itself.
Quite a bit, actually. A self-serve Ads Manager dashboard has surfaced in testing. Campaigns > Ad Groups > Ads, the same structure you’d recognise from Google and Meta. Real-time reporting has replaced the weekly CSV files that early advertisers were stuck with. The minimum spend has reportedly dropped to $50k, a CPC model of $3-5 now sits alongside CPM, and there’s an advertiser portal live at openai.com/advertisers.
Things are moving quickly. The question is whether you need to move with them right now.
Not yet - unless you’re enterprise-level with real budget to test at scale. It’s US only, there’s no confirmed UK launch date, and the CTR data is a bit sobering: ~1.3% vs Google Search’s 29.2%. That gap is significant. But here’s what does matter and why this conversation is bigger than the ad product itself.
ChatGPT doesn’t run on keyword intent. It runs on context and conversion. A user isn’t typing ‘running shoes’. THey’re asking for shoes for flat feet, under £100, for marathon training. And following up three times. Targeting uses what OpenAI called ‘context hints’ - plain-language descriptions of when ads should appear. No demographic segments. No behavioural layers. No audience lists.
That’s a fundamentally different game to the one we’ve been playing for 20 years.
When this does land in the UK, the brands that have already figured out how to speak to conversational context will have a head start. The ones waiting for it to look like Google Ads will be playing catch up.
How can I advertise on ChatGPT right now?
You can't - simple as that. It's still limited to US advertisers with significant budgets, and there's no news yet on UK access. Watch this space.
What should I be doing to prepare?
Stay informed. Follow the latest announcements directly via OpenAI, and keep an eye on what's being discussed in the industry (we post regular updates on LinkedIn if you want a shortcut). Beyond that, it's worth getting your board and stakeholders comfortable with the idea of a future test, and the budget that comes with it. This is the new shiny thing, but that doesn't mean it's right for every brand. The smartest thing you can do right now is understand it well enough to make that call when the time comes.
