ChatGPT Ads: how they work, and whether to start now

An ad is one square image, your advertiser name, one headline, one description and one link. That is the whole unit. There is no rotation set, no keywords, no match types, no sitelinks, no callouts and no display paths.

If you have run Google Ads, the instinct is to write a set of headlines and let the system assemble them. That instinct is wrong here and it will cost you. We built for this platform and initially wrote descriptions at Google length. They would have arrived cut in half on a phone.

Variation comes from building more ads, not from stuffing more lines into one.

Ads appear only to adults on the Free and ChatGPT Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education subscribers see none, and OpenAI does not serve ads to anyone it identifies or predicts to be under 18.

This matters more than most coverage admits. The paying subscribers, who skew towards the professionals and higher earners many businesses most want to reach, are the exact people the ads cannot touch. If your buyer is a senior person at a company that expenses their tooling, a meaningful share of them are invisible to this channel.

For consumer and small-business audiences the reach is real. For enterprise software sold to people on Pro accounts, be honest with yourself about who is left.

The structure is campaign, then ad group, then ads. The campaign carries the objective, the geography, the budget and the dates. The ad group carries your maximum cost per click and your context hints. The ads sit underneath.

Context hints are the part that breaks people's mental model. You are not buying a keyword and waiting for an exact match. You are describing the kind of conversation your ad belongs in, and the system decides where that fits. It behaves more like audience targeting on Meta than keyword targeting on Google.

Geo-targeting, custom audiences and conversion measurement are all there. Measurement runs through the OpenAI Pixel and a conversions API, so you can optimise towards conversions rather than clicks once you have enough volume.

Reported costs sit around $25 to $60 CPM and $3 to $5 per click, with $60 CPM listed as the default maximum bid. Costs are quoted in dollars because that is how the platform and the available benchmarks report them.

Cost per click varies sharply by sector. Ecommerce sits at the bottom of that range, around $3 to $5. Software and finance run far higher, roughly $8 to $18. Treat any single published figure as a starting point, not a forecast for your account.

There is no longer a minimum commitment. The $200,000 floor from the February 2026 pilot was removed when self-serve opened.

Click-through rate is low compared with search. Industry figures put ChatGPT ads near 0.9 percent against roughly 6.4 percent for Google search. Those are not equivalent contexts, and a straight comparison flatters Google, but the direction is real: fewer people click.

What offsets it is intent. Early data from Criteo shows referrals from large language model platforms converting at about 1.5 times the rate of other digital channels. Someone who has just asked an assistant to help them choose is further down the decision than someone scrolling a results page.

The stronger argument is timing. OpenAI reported ChatGPT Ads passing a $1 billion annualised run rate in under 200 days. Auction prices follow advertiser density, and advertiser density is climbing. Whatever you can learn cheaply now gets more expensive to learn later.

Start small and treat the first month as buying information rather than buying customers. A modest daily budget across several genuinely different ads will teach you more than one carefully agonised ad at a higher spend.

Get the conversion tracking in before the first pound goes out, not after. Optimising towards clicks on a channel whose whole advantage is conversion quality throws away the advantage.

Write for the format rather than adapting Google copy. Short headline, one idea, a product image that shows the thing itself. And fix your ad account name first, because it is what people see attached to every ad you run.