ChatGPT Ads Changelog: Every Documented Change, Dated and Sourced
By The InPromptAds Team 7 min read
Last verified 15 August 2026. Version 1.0. Updated weekly, whether or not anything changed.
OpenAI updates its advertiser documentation without announcing it. Help centre articles carry an "Updated" timestamp and change underneath it, so a page you read in July and quote in September may no longer say what you quoted. Trade coverage is worse, because those articles get rewritten in place with the original publication date left on them.
That produces a category where almost every guide is confidently wrong about something, and nobody can tell which part, because nothing is dated at the claim level.
This page is the record. Each entry carries a date, a source, a tier, and where it applies, what it superseded. Entries are never edited after publication. Corrections are appended as new entries and the original is struck rather than deleted, because a changelog you can rewrite is not a changelog.
Tiers. Confirmed means OpenAI documentation or an OpenAI announcement. Reported means credible third-party coverage we have not been able to verify against a primary source. Our measurement means we ran the check ourselves and state the method.
August 2026
14 August — OpenAI emails Indian users about advertising
Reported · BestMediaInfo
OpenAI notified Indian ChatGPT users of a privacy policy update covering advertising, setting out how ads work, the controls available, and that ads appear for Free and Go subscribers but not Plus or Pro. The email quoted Indian pricing at ₹399 a month for Go and ₹1,999 for Plus. It stated that advertisers do not receive user chats, only aggregated performance data, and that ads do not influence answers.
At the time of the email OpenAI had not announced an advertising rollout for India, and its availability documentation did not list India. Not confirmed by OpenAI. We have not observed an ad serve to an Indian user.
13 August — Mexico moves from Coming Soon to Available
Confirmed · OpenAI Help Center, [Ads Manager](https://ads.openai.com/) Availability
The advertiser-eligible country list now shows nine countries all marked Available: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Supersedes the 8 August state of the same page, which listed Mexico as Coming Soon. No announcement accompanied the change. We caught it on a scheduled re-check.
8 August — Targeting catalogue counted
Our measurement
We pulled OpenAI's geotargets file from developers.openai.com/ads/openai-geotargets.csv and counted it: 42,110 rows, of which 41,488 are United States postal codes. The file lists 249 countries as selectable targets, including India, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Germany and France, none of which serve ads.
Sub-national targeting exists for the United States at postal code level, Japan by prefecture, South Korea by metropolitan city and province, New Zealand by region, Canada by province and territory, Australia by state and territory, and the United Kingdom by nation. Every other country is a single row.
Why it matters: the catalogue is a targeting picker, not an availability list, and reading it as the latter is currently the most common way a buyer in an excluded market reaches a false conclusion.
July 2026
31 July — Troubleshooting documentation updated
Confirmed · OpenAI Help Center, [Troubleshooting Common Issues](https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001217-troubleshooting-common-issues)
The revision that added the crawler finding. OpenAI lists landing pages that block OpenAI user agents or IP addresses as a cause of ad rejection, which couples paid delivery to a decision usually made by a security team.
Also documented in this revision: image rules of PNG or JPG, square, no larger than 1200 by 1200 pixels, publicly accessible with a URL that opens directly to the image, hosted on public Google Drive, AWS S3, CloudFront, or the advertiser's own domain or CDN. Reporting lags delivery by up to seven hours, and advertisers should allow 24 hours before flagging a delivery issue.
30 July — Advertiser basics documentation updated
Confirmed · OpenAI Help Center, Ads in ChatGPT
Revised audience wording: ads are not shown to users on Plus, Pro or any Business plan, or to users OpenAI predicts are under 18.
Supersedes earlier wording that named Education plans explicitly and specified logged-in status. Both dropped in this revision. Any page still describing the ad-eligible audience as "logged-in Free and Go users, with Education excluded" is quoting a version of this document that no longer exists.
The same revision lists the ad unit fields, advertiser name, favicon, title, copy, landing page and image, and states no character limits.
15 July — Ad policies v1.3
Confirmed · [OpenAI ad policies](https://openai.com/policies/ad-policies/)
Advertising restricted to consumer categories: household and consumer goods, local services, travel and experiences, digital products and education. Disallowed: gambling, alcohol, tobacco, dating and adult content, recreational drugs, counterfeit goods, political content, legal services.
Financial and health advertisers may be approved case by case with proof of licensure, across a defined list. Ads for financial services outside the United States are generally prohibited, and the same applies to health services. The case-by-case route is a US carve-out, which is the detail most summaries of this policy drop.
No ads run beside conversations about personal health, mental health or politics, or in sensitive user journeys.
May 2026
5 May — Entry commitment removed
Confirmed · OpenAI
The 200,000 USD entry commitment was removed.
This is the single most misquoted change in the category. It is routinely reported as "OpenAI removed the minimum spend requirement entirely," which is wrong. The entry commitment and the campaign floor are different things, and the campaign floor remains: 25 USD per day per campaign in the United States, 15 GBP in the United Kingdom, 2,500 JPY in Japan, 25,000 KRW in South Korea, 25 AUD, 25 CAD and 25 NZD respectively, 40 BRL in Brazil and 150 MXN in Mexico.
Pages still asserting no minimum spend are describing a product that does not exist.
Open items we are tracking
Not changes. Questions with no documented answer, listed so the absence is on the record.
| Question | Status as of 15 Aug 2026 |
|---|---|
| Creative character limits | Not documented by OpenAI. Third-party claims range from 16 to 50 characters for the title and disagree by more than half |
| India advertiser or serving access | No announcement. Privacy groundwork reported 14 August |
| UAE advertiser or serving access | No announcement |
| Performance benchmarks | OpenAI states none exist across advertisers, industries or campaign types |
| Approval rates and review timelines by vertical | Not published by OpenAI or by any third party |
| Ads-Free option take-up rate | Not published |
How this page is maintained
Checked weekly against OpenAI's advertiser documentation, the ad policies page, the Ads Manager Availability page and the geotargets file. The version line at the top is updated on every check, including checks that find nothing, because a changelog that only updates when something changed cannot be distinguished from one that has been abandoned.
Entries are appended, not edited. If we get something wrong, the correction appears as a dated entry and the original stays visible.
Quick answers
When did OpenAI remove the ChatGPT ads minimum spend? OpenAI removed the 200,000 USD entry commitment on 5 May 2026. It did not remove the campaign minimum, which remains 25 USD per day per campaign in the United States with local equivalents elsewhere.
Which countries can advertise on ChatGPT? As of 13 August 2026, nine countries are marked Available: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Mexico moved from Coming Soon on that date.
Has OpenAI announced ChatGPT ads in India? No. OpenAI emailed Indian users about an advertising privacy policy update on 14 August 2026, reported by BestMediaInfo. That is not a rollout announcement and India does not appear on OpenAI's availability documentation.
Who does OpenAI not show ads to? Per documentation updated 30 July 2026, users on Plus, Pro or any Business plan, and users OpenAI predicts are under 18. Earlier wording naming Education plans and logged-in status was superseded.
Related reading
- ChatGPT ads eligibility by country — the two lists, maintained on the same cadence
- What has to be true before you can run a ChatGPT ad
- Advertising from an excluded market
Changelog of this changelog
15 August 2026. v1.0 published, seeded from entries dated 5 May to 14 August 2026.
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Writes about AI-native advertising and the shift from search to conversation.
