How to Run ChatGPT Ads: Account Setup and Launch Checklist
By Keshav Parsai 17 min read
In brief
Run these 11 checks in order before your first ChatGPT ad: the free disqualifiers, the signup choice you can't undo, and the blockers that cost days.
Last verified 2 October 2026. Version 1.2. Next scheduled review 2 November 2026.
Every setup guide for ChatGPT ads opens the same way. Go to ads.openai.com. Create your account. Pick an objective. Write your creative.
That order will cost you weeks, and in one specific case it will cost you the account.
The conditions that gate a ChatGPT ad are not a flat list. They fall into three classes, and the classes matter more than the items. Four conditions can disqualify you outright and every one of them is free to check before you write a word. One condition is irreversible: you make the choice during signup, it cannot be edited afterwards, and getting it wrong means abandoning the account and starting again with a different email address. The rest are blockers, fixable, but each one quietly costs you days while you wait on a queue nobody can expedite.
Published tutorials check them in roughly the reverse of that order. You can see why. A tutorial that opens by telling most readers they are not eligible is a bad tutorial. It is also the honest one.
Nothing below requires an advertiser account to verify.
The short version
| Class | Condition | Cost to check | What failure looks like |
|---|---|---|---|
| Disqualifier | Business registered in a supported country | Free, one page | You cannot open an account at all |
| Disqualifier | What you sell is an allowed category | Free, one page | Application rejected at verification |
| Disqualifier | Your buyers sit in a serving market | Free, one page | Account works, nobody sees the ads |
| Disqualifier | Someone can grant you the Ads Admin role | Free, one check | You cannot create the account |
| Irreversible | Country, currency and time zone at signup | Free, but one shot | Abandon the account, start again |
| Blocker | Identity and business verification | Free, but queued | Waiting, and it cannot be expedited |
| Blocker | Account name and logo saved in settings | Free, two minutes | Ads silently will not serve |
| Blocker | Billing profile and payment method | Free | Campaigns will not deliver |
| Blocker | Landing page does not block OAI-AdsBot | Free, one command | Ads rejected |
| Blocker | Creative meets the documented image rules | Free | Ads rejected |
| Blocker | You can fund 25 USD a day per campaign | Depends | Campaign will not run |
The four that disqualify you
Where your business is registered
Advertiser eligibility follows the country your business is registered in, not the country your customers are in. This is the most common misreading in the category and it is not close.
OpenAI's current Ads Manager Availability page lists 52 self-service countries, including India and much of Europe. The legal business entity must be registered in one of them.
Check the maintained page before setup rather than trusting an undated article. OpenAI expanded the list materially on 31 August 2026.
What you sell
Ad policies v1.6, updated 10 September 2026, limits advertising primarily to consumer categories: household and consumer goods, local services, travel and experiences, digital products and education.
Disallowed outright: gambling, alcohol, tobacco, dating and adult content, recreational drugs, counterfeit goods, political content, legal services.
Finance, healthcare and legal services are where the shorthand version costs people a month. OpenAI may approve advertisers in all three categories case by case in the United States with proof of licensure. Legal advertisers must be licensed in the jurisdiction where the ad is shown. Outside the United States, the case-by-case route is not open. If you are a licensed insurer or law firm in Toronto, nothing downstream in this checklist changes that.
Legal services are not permitted in any market. Legal education is, which is how LSAT prep can advertise and a personal injury firm cannot.
There is a separate layer that has nothing to do with your category. Ads do not run beside conversations about personal health, mental health or politics, or in what the policy calls sensitive user journeys. If your product gets bought during exactly those conversations, your inventory is thinner than your category suggests, and no amount of bidding fixes that.
Where your buyers are
Opening an account and reaching users are different permissions. Merging them is the most common error in the published guidance.
Advertiser-country access and campaign targeting are separate checks. A supported legal entity can create an account, but you should still confirm the desired buyer location in the live campaign picker.
There is a third list that almost nobody has opened. OpenAI publishes its full targeting catalogue as a CSV at developers.openai.com/ads/openai-geotargets.csv. We pulled it on 8 August 2026 and counted it: 42,110 rows, of which 41,488 are United States postal codes. It lists 249 countries as selectable targets. In August that included India, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Germany and France, none of which were open then. All six are on the 63-country self-service list now, which is the point: the catalogue ran ahead of availability, so it was never the list to plan from.
Below country level the file is thin nearly everywhere.
| Country | Sub-national rows | What you can actually target |
|---|---|---|
| United States | 41,755 | 57 regions, 210 TV regions, 41,488 postal codes |
| Japan | 47 | Prefectures |
| South Korea | 17 | Metropolitan cities and provinces |
| New Zealand | 17 | Regions |
| Canada | 13 | Provinces and territories |
| Australia | 8 | States and territories |
| United Kingdom | 4 | England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales |
| Everywhere else | 0 | A country row, nothing beneath it |
The catalogue is a roadmap, not an availability list, and OpenAI half-admits it by telling you to confirm each location in the campaign picker during setup. Plan geography from that CSV and you are planning against a file that describes an intention.
OpenAI's campaign documentation now says campaigns can target "states or regions, cities, markets, and postal codes where available", varying by country. Read plainly: the United States is still the only market with documented postal-code depth, and everywhere else the live picker is the only reliable answer. Two more checks belong here. New feed-based campaigns are country-level only. And some new self-serve accounts can advertise only in their home country until verification is approved and they reach a required spend there, so a campaign aimed abroad from a new account may not deliver at all. The per-country detail is in our country directory.
Whether anyone can grant you the role
Not an eligibility rule, and it stops people for days anyway.
If you cannot create an ad account, the cause is usually a missing role rather than a platform restriction. Someone needs to grant you the Ads Admin role at admin.openai.com, under Users, then your profile, then Direct roles, then assign Ads Admin.
Worth clearing early, because it sits with whoever administers your workspace rather than with you, and those people are on their own schedule.
The one you cannot undo
This is the condition nobody writes about, and it is the reason this article is ordered the way it is.
During signup you enter a country or region, a billing currency and a time zone. OpenAI's documentation is blunt about what happens next: those cannot be changed later. They affect billing, reporting and account eligibility, and if any of them is wrong the fix is to create a new advertiser account with the correct information.
Creating that replacement is not trivial either. Each advertiser account has to be created with a different email address, and an address already used cannot be reused. So a mistyped time zone at signup means a fresh account, a fresh email, and a fresh trip through the verification queue.
Some other account-level fields may also not be self-serve editable after creation. OpenAI's guidance is to review your country, currency, time zone, legal business name, advertiser website and billing details before submitting, using the details of the entity that will actually advertise and be billed.
If you take one thing from this page: the signup form is not a form. It is a decision, and it is the only one here you get a single attempt at. Have the legal entity details in front of you before you start.
The blockers
Verification, which you cannot rush
Verification runs through Persona after you enter your business and account details, and then the application goes into review.
Two things are worth knowing before you build a launch plan around a date. Verification and account review are separate steps, so completing an identity check does not mean the account is ready to run campaigns. And OpenAI says applications sit in a rolling queue with high volume, that review may take some time, and, in its own words, that it is unable to expedite account review or ad review requests at this time.
Do not submit a second application to speed things up. Duplicates do not bypass review, they create confusion about which account is the real one, and they can slow the thing you were trying to accelerate. Same for inconsistent documents at the verification step.
Only one person should create the account. Everyone else gets invited afterwards through Settings, Users, Invite.
The settings step that fails silently
After the access email arrives, go to Settings, then Account info, and set the account name and logo exactly as you want them to appear in the ad unit.
OpenAI's wording is that ads will not serve unless this step is complete. There is no error, no rejection, no warning in the campaign builder. The campaign just sits there. It is the cheapest failure on this page to avoid and one of the hardest to diagnose, because nothing about it looks broken.
Billing, both halves of it
Billing is two separate things and campaigns will not deliver until both exist. A billing profile with your business name, invoice delivery email and full billing address including state or region and postal code. Then a payment method with card details.
People complete one and assume they are done.
Whether your landing page lets the crawler in
OpenAI lists landing pages that block its user agents or IP addresses as a cause of ad rejection. Your paid campaign depends on a crawler reaching your site, which means a decision made by a security team can kill a media buy without anyone connecting the two.
This catches more brands than it should. Blocking AI scrapers was widely recommended through 2025 and 2026, and the people who did it were not the people buying ads. The bot that matters here is OAI-AdsBot, a different agent from GPTBot, and a block can live in three places: robots.txt, a WAF or CDN managed rule, or server-level IP blocking. A CDN managed rule is served ahead of your repository robots.txt, which is how a site ends up blocking a crawler that its own robots.txt welcomes.
We hit this on our sister company's site, so this is experience rather than theory. The full diagnostic has the one-command check and what the output should look like.
Creative that clears the documented rules
The image rules are documented precisely. PNG or JPG, square, from 256 by 256 to 1200 by 1200 pixels, publicly accessible, and the URL has to open directly to the image rather than to a page containing it. Accepted hosting is a public Google Drive link, AWS S3 or CloudFront, or self-hosted on your own domain or CDN.
The ad unit carries an advertiser name, a favicon, a title, copy, a landing page and an image.
The character limits are not documented, and the numbers circulating disagree by half. OpenAI's own advertiser page lists the fields and states no character limits. One practitioner reference publishes 24-character titles and 48-character descriptions. A widely watched tutorial says 16 and 32. We are not going to pick one and print it as fact. Write tight, expect truncation, confirm inside your own account.
Whether you can fund the floor
The claim that ChatGPT ads have no minimum spend is everywhere and it is out of date. The 200,000 USD entry commitment went away on 5 May 2026. A campaign floor is a different thing.
The current minimum daily spend is 25 USD per campaign in the United States. It is 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.
Two consequences nobody publishes. At the 60 USD default maximum CPM, 25 USD a day buys roughly 417 impressions. At a 3 USD CPC it buys about eight clicks a day, at 5 USD about five. Getting to 100 clicks at the floor takes twelve to twenty days. Anyone telling you to test this channel on the minimum is describing a three week experiment, whether or not they know it.
One trap before you set anything. A campaign-total budget is now paced: OpenAI's Budget Pacing documentation says delivery slows when spend runs ahead of schedule and catches up when it falls behind, over the time to your end date or a default 60 days. It also says pacing does not guarantee the budget lasts to the end date. A daily budget is a seven-day average that can spend up to twice its figure on a single day. Start on a daily budget, because underdelivery is easier to see.
After that, review
Review happens at three levels: the advertiser, the creative and landing page together, then the placement.
Most of it runs on classifiers and language models with human oversight, escalating to people based on severity, confidence and risk. Restricted categories draw extra verification or manual review. Ads and landing pages the systems cannot evaluate at all are not eligible to run, which is a different failure from rejection and produces an identical result.
If an ad is rejected, open the Ads tab, check Status, and hover a Not serving ad to see why. You can edit and resubmit, or request another review if you think it was wrong. Ad review cannot be expedited either.
Review does not stop at approval. OpenAI keeps monitoring live ads through user feedback, automated metrics and quality evaluations, and can limit delivery or pull an ad afterwards.
What you cannot check in advance
Whether your ads will deliver at your bid. There is no public inventory forecast and no way to size the addressable audience for your category before you spend.
How long manual review takes for finance, health or legal. No approval rate, no timeline, and no expediting. That is precisely the number a restricted advertiser needs before committing a quarter to this.
What good looks like. OpenAI's own FAQ says the platform does not yet have performance benchmarks across advertisers, industries or campaign types. Any benchmark you are shown is one account over a short window, or another platform's numbers wearing a new label.
Before you panic about delivery
Reporting lags delivery by up to seven hours. Give it a full 24 hours before you treat zero impressions as a fault.
If it still is not serving, the documented causes are: the ad has not cleared review, account verification is incomplete, the campaign budget is exhausted, the end date has passed, or the payment method is failing. The full troubleshooting reference covers all nine documented failure modes and what to send support for each.
Quick answers
How do I advertise on ChatGPT? Confirm your business is registered in one of the 52 supported self-service countries, confirm your category is allowed, verify the target location in Ads Manager, and confirm your landing page does not block OAI-AdsBot. Then create the business account with the correct legal entity details, because country, currency and time zone cannot be changed afterwards.
Can anyone advertise on ChatGPT? No. It depends on where the legal business entity is registered and what it sells. OpenAI currently lists 52 self-service countries, and category policies still apply.
Can businesses of any size advertise on ChatGPT? Yes, since the entry commitment was removed on 5 May 2026, subject to the 25 USD daily campaign floor and the conditions above.
Can I change my country or currency after creating a ChatGPT advertiser account? No. Country or region, billing currency and time zone are fixed at creation. Fixing a mistake means creating a new advertiser account with a different email address, because an address already used for one account cannot be reused.
How long does ChatGPT ads account approval take? OpenAI does not publish a timeline. Applications sit in a rolling queue described as high volume, and OpenAI states it cannot expedite account or ad review. Submitting a duplicate application can slow it down.
Why was my ChatGPT ad rejected? The documented causes are ad copy or landing pages that conflict with the ad policies, and landing pages that block OpenAI's user agents or IP addresses. Check Status in the Ads tab and hover a Not serving ad for the specific reason.
My campaign launched and has zero impressions. What now? Wait 24 hours, since reporting lags delivery by up to seven hours. Then check that account name and logo are saved in Settings, verification is complete, the billing profile and payment method both exist, the budget is not exhausted and the end date has not passed.
How much do I need to spend to start? 25 USD a day per campaign in the United States. A readable test of 100 clicks takes twelve to twenty days at that floor, so budget for the duration rather than the daily number.
What are the ChatGPT ad character limits? OpenAI does not publish them. Practitioner figures span 16 to 50 characters for headlines. Image rules are documented: PNG or JPG, square, from 256 by 256 to 1200 by 1200 pixels.
Do I need an agency to run ChatGPT ads? No. Self-serve has been open since 5 May 2026. Guidance saying access is limited to holding companies and direct OpenAI partnerships describes the February to April 2026 pilot and is out of date.
Sources
| Source | Tier | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAI Help Center, Ads Manager Availability, retrieved 13 September 2026 | Confirmed, primary | The current 52-country list, legal-entity rule and agency workflow |
| OpenAI Help Center, Ads Manager Beta Account Setup (article 20001213), retrieved 8 August 2026 | Confirmed, primary | The five-step setup flow, Persona verification, the rolling review queue and no expediting, irreversibility of country, currency and time zone, account name and logo gating delivery, billing profile and payment as separate steps, one email per advertiser account, duplicate applications |
| OpenAI Help Center, Create Campaigns for ChatGPT Ads (article 20001210), retrieved 2 October 2026 | Confirmed, primary | Minimum daily spend by billing currency, campaign-total budget behaviour, location levels "where available", home-country restriction, feed campaign geography |
| OpenAI Help Center, Troubleshooting Common Issues (article 20001217), retrieved 8 August 2026 | Confirmed, primary | Rejection causes, the Ads Admin role path, image specifications, seven-hour reporting lag, the 24 hour rule, zero-impression checklist |
| OpenAI Help Center, Ads in ChatGPT: The Basics (article 20001207), retrieved 8 August 2026 | Confirmed, primary | Ad unit fields, absence of documented character limits, bid guidance |
| OpenAI Help Center, Frequently Asked Questions (article 20001220), retrieved 8 August 2026 | Confirmed, primary | Beta status, absence of performance benchmarks |
| OpenAI Ad Policies v1.6, updated 10 September 2026 | Confirmed, primary | Allowed and disallowed categories, the US-only carve-out for finance, health and legal services, placement policy, three-level review, post-approval monitoring |
OpenAI Ads location catalogue, developers.openai.com/ads/openai-geotargets.csv, retrieved 8 August 2026 |
Confirmed, primary | All row counts and per-country granularity. Counted by us, not published by OpenAI in this form |
| Index Lab creative specs page, and a widely circulated setup tutorial | Reported, practitioner | The two conflicting character-limit claims, presented as conflicting |
| Impression and click arithmetic at the daily floor | Our calculation | Derived from OpenAI's published bid guidance and daily minimums |
Related reading
- How to advertise on ChatGPT, step by step: the same launch, written as seven steps.
- What Are ChatGPT Ads? The format, the four gates, pricing, and what the platform will not tell you.
- Blocking AI Crawlers Can Get Your ChatGPT Ads Rejected That condition in full, with the diagnostic.
- ChatGPT Ads Troubleshooting: Every Documented Failure Mode What to do when it fails anyway.
- ChatGPT Ads vs Google Ads vs Meta Ads Where this channel sits against the two you already run.
- Why People Respond to Ads Differently Inside a Conversation The reasoning window, once you are cleared to buy.
- ChatGPT Ads and Google AI Mode Ads The two surfaces we build placements on.
- Glossary chat_card, context hints, GEO.
InPromptAds buys and manages paid placement inside AI assistants. It is a Newtation company, and Newtation works the organic side of the same surface.
Changelog. Version 1.2, 2 October 2026. Updated the location gate: the countries the August catalogue listed but did not serve are now open, OpenAI documents sub-national levels including cities "where available", and new accounts may be held to their home country. Version 1.1, 13 September 2026. Refreshed the overdue review against policy v1.6, added US-only legal-services eligibility, and added the 256-pixel image minimum. Version 1.0, 8 August 2026, first publication.
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Keshav studies how AI systems retrieve, verify, and cite brand information. At InPromptAds, he leads source research and turns platform documentation into practical guidance for advertisers.
