How to advertise on ChatGPT, step by step.

To advertise on ChatGPT, sign up at ads.openai.com with a business registered in one of the 63 supported countries, then work through seven steps:

1. Check that you can advertise
2. Create your Ads Manager account
3. Set up a campaign
4. Build ad groups with context hints and bids
5. Write the ads
6. Set up conversion tracking
7. Launch, then judge it on the right timeline

Ads appear below ChatGPT answers for users on the Free and Go plans. They are matched to the conversation through context hints rather than keywords, and every campaign has a minimum daily budget, 25 USD in the US. Every step below is checked against OpenAI's documentation and links to a deeper field note.

Confirm three things before you open an account, because each one can stop a campaign that is otherwise ready.

• Your country. OpenAI's availability page says the legal entity that will advertise and be billed must be based in a listed country. There are 63, including the US, UK, India, the UAE, Singapore and every EU member state. Check yours on the ChatGPT Ads countries list.
• Your category. OpenAI's ad policies focus on consumer categories: household and consumer goods, local services, travel and entertainment, digital products and education. Financial, health and legal services can be approved case by case in the US only and are generally prohibited elsewhere. Gambling, alcohol, tobacco, dating and political ads are not allowed. See which categories can advertise.
• Your landing page. OpenAI lists pages that block its user agents as a cause of ad rejection. Make sure robots.txt, your firewall and your CDN let OAI-AdsBot through. Our OAI-AdsBot checker tests this in a minute.

Go to ads.openai.com and sign in with an OpenAI login. You can start from your website URL, which drafts a first ad for you, or skip straight to Ads Manager.

• Country, currency and time zone are permanent. OpenAI says none of the three can be changed after the account is created. The currency also sets your minimum daily budget.
• Three names, three jobs. Since 25 September 2026 an account has an Account Name (internal), a Brand Name (shown on your ads) and a Legal Name (used for billing and verification). Changing the Brand Name later pauses serving until it is re-approved.
• Billing before anything delivers. Add a card and billing details. Billing is postpay: you are charged as spend accrues, not upfront. See how ChatGPT Ads billing works.
• Verification and access. Complete business verification, then invite colleagues or an agency as Admin, Member or Viewer. Details in account setup and verification.

A campaign holds the objective, the budget and the targeting that every ad group inside it shares.

• Objective. Views bills per thousand impressions (CPM). Clicks bills per valid click (CPC). Conversions optimises toward a conversion event and bills per click (oCPC) or per thousand impressions (oCPM). You never pay per conversion, and the objective cannot be changed after creation.
• Budget. Start with a daily budget. OpenAI treats it as an average over a Sunday-to-Saturday week: one day can spend up to twice the figure, the week no more than seven times it. A campaign-total budget is paced toward your end date, or over 60 days if you set none, and switching from total to daily cannot be undone. See daily versus total budget.
• Dates. Your first campaign may not show start and end dates until after it is published. OpenAI advises against publishing just to reach those settings, because the ads can start immediately.
• Countries. Choose where ads can show. New self-serve accounts may be limited to their home country until verification is approved and they reach a required spend there. Finer levels, including states, cities and postal codes, are available only in some countries. See location targeting.
• Platforms. Android app, Android web, desktop web, iOS app and iOS web. Leave all five on to start, then prune using the Platform breakdown in Insights. See platform targeting.
• Custom audiences. Including an audience needs at least 25,000 matched users; excluding one can use a smaller list. For campaigns targeting the EEA or Switzerland, OpenAI says to avoid custom audiences for now. See custom audiences.

ChatGPT Ads has no keywords. Instead, each ad group carries context hints: short descriptions of the conversations, topics or needs where your product is relevant. OpenAI says they guide matching but are not exact-match keywords and do not guarantee delivery in any particular conversation.

• Group by situation, not by product. One ad group per buying situation ("finance team comparing expense tools before an audit") reads better than one per product line. See account structure without keywords and how many ad groups to run.
• Write hints from customer language. The best source is how buyers describe the problem on sales calls, not your feature list. See how to write context hints, or draft some with our context hints generator.
• Set the maximum bid. Bids live at ad group level: a maximum CPM for Views campaigns or a maximum CPC for Clicks. OpenAI recommends starting Clicks campaigns at 3 to 5 USD. The auction is relevance-weighted and second-price, so you usually pay less than your maximum. See how bidding works.

An ad appears below a ChatGPT answer and contains the advertiser name, a favicon, a title, description copy, a landing page and an image.

• Image. PNG or JPG, square, from 256 by 256 to 1200 by 1200 pixels, at a public URL that opens directly to the image. It can render as small as 256 pixels, so test legibility at that size. See designing for 256 pixels.
• Text length. OpenAI publishes no character limits, and third-party figures disagree, from 16 to 50 characters for the title. Write the shortest version that still makes sense and check how it renders. See ad specs.
• Say something the answer did not. The ad sits under an answer the reader just read. Copy that repeats the answer is wasted; copy that adds a specific next step, price or proof earns the click. See ad copy that reads useful.
• Do not imitate ChatGPT. OpenAI's ad policies let it remove ads that copy the appearance, functionality or voice of ChatGPT. Matching the register of a conversation is fine; pretending to be the assistant is not.
• Run two or three variants per ad group so you have something to compare.

Set this up before launch. Without it, a Conversions campaign has nothing to optimise toward and you cannot judge any campaign beyond clicks.

• Pixel. Install OpenAI's ads pixel directly or through Google Tag Manager, and fire the events that matter. See pixel setup. In Europe, check consent first: the pixel and GDPR.
• Conversions API. Send events from your server when the conversion happens away from the browser. Event timestamps must fall within the last seven days, which matters for slow B2B pipelines. See when the Conversions API beats the pixel.
• UTMs and macros. Add UTM parameters to landing page URLs, and use the {campaign_id}, {ad_group_id} and {ad_id} macros so every click carries its source into analytics and your CRM. See UTM naming.

Submit for review. OpenAI reviews the advertiser, the ad and the landing page, mostly with automated systems and human escalation for restricted categories, and publishes no review timeline. See how long approval takes.

• Reporting lags. Impressions and clicks refresh about every 15 minutes, but spend can lag 7 to 8 hours. A zero spend figure on day one does not mean nothing is running.
• Underdelivery is the usual first problem, not overspend. If a campaign will not spend, check review status, verification, billing, then bids and how narrow your hints and targeting are. See why a campaign is not spending and troubleshooting.
• Decide the finish line first. Agree the spend, duration and result that mean stop or scale before launch. See the first fourteen days and when to kill a test.

There is no entry commitment; the 200,000 USD minimum from the early pilot was removed in May 2026. Every campaign does have a minimum daily budget, set by your account's billing currency:

OpenAI recommends starting Clicks campaigns at a 3 to 5 USD maximum CPC. The minimum is not what a useful test costs: at 25 USD a day and a 3 to 5 USD click, you get roughly five to eight clicks a day. See ChatGPT Ads cost and pricing, every market's minimum on the country guides, or model a test with the budget calculator.

1. Opening the account under the wrong country or currency. Neither can be changed, and the currency sets your minimum.
2. Blocking OAI-AdsBot with a firewall or bot-protection rule, so ads are rejected for a landing page the reviewer cannot reach.
3. Writing hints like keywords. "Expense software" is a keyword; "finance lead comparing expense tools before an audit" is a context hint.
4. Narrowing everything at once. One country region, one platform and a small audience on a new account usually means a campaign that will not spend. Start broad, then narrow.
5. Launching without tracking. Clicks alone cannot tell you whether the channel works, and a Conversions campaign cannot optimise without events.

InPromptAds plans, launches and measures ChatGPT ads for B2B brands, starting with a category and readiness check. See the managed ChatGPT ads service.