Advertising is definitively entering the ChatGPT experience and is already beginning to acquire a relevant dimension within OpenAI’s business. The company has announced that its advertising operation, launched around 200 days ago, has exceeded $1 billion in annualized revenue. The ads are now available in more than 40 countries, although their expansion has been progressive and in markets like Spain their arrival is much more recent.

The company counts in its process by sending an email to ChatGPT users to inform them of the arrival of the ads and of a consequent update in its Privacy Policy, related to this new model. The message especially focuses on two issues that may be sensitive: the use of conversations to determine what advertising to show and the degree of access of advertisers to user information.

In this sense, OpenAI maintains that conversations remain private from advertisers and that advertising works independently of the responses generated by ChatGPT. It also differentiates between contextual ads and future advertising personalization, which will depend on user choices and controls.

The communication to users thus marks a new stage in the construction of OpenAI’s advertising business. And this August 31, the company opened access to its self-service advertising platform to advertisers in India, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, expanding a model that it began testing in the United States last February.

In Europe, the expansion is still recent. OpenAI announced on August 18 the arrival of ChatGPT Ads to 31 European markets, including Spain, after the first months of testing in the United States. It had previously extended the program to other countries and on August 11 confirmed its launch in the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea.

One of the central points of the communication sent to users is how ChatGPT will decide what advertising to show. OpenAI notes that, initially, the ads will not be personalized. To select them, you will use the topic of the conversation that is currently being held and a limited amount of contextual information, such as general location or device type.
Its Privacy Policy also includes signals such as the time of day among the information that can be used to display generic advertising. This means that the intention itself expressed during a conversation can function as an advertising signal. A person using ChatGPT to plan a trip, search for a product, or compare certain options could find advertising related to that context.

The approach connects with one of the opportunities that OpenAI has been pointing out for its advertising product: ChatGPT receives queries in which people do not just enter some keywords, but rather explain what they want to do, what their preferences are and what conditions they have. For the company, these moments of exploration, comparison and decision open a new opportunity for brands. Personalization will come later and will require a user choice.

This commercial opportunity is also beginning to translate into new tools for advertisers. Since its launch in the United States, OpenAI has incorporated cost-per-click (CPC) purchasing, in addition to the initial model based on cost per thousand impressions (CPM), and has eliminated the requirement for a minimum investment of $50,000 to access its self-service Ads Manager in that market.
The next phase will expand that offering even further. OpenAI has announced that it will bring ChatGPT Ads to new markets and will incorporate additional formats, objectives, purchasing options and measurement capabilities. It also ensures that it will explore new ways for companies to interact with consumers in more native ways within ChatGPT.

Advertisers will not be able to access conversations

This is one of the limits that OpenAI emphasizes most insistently. The company ensures that advertisers do not have access to chats, conversation history, memories or personal data of the user. It also does not sell this data to advertisers. It will use information about ads viewed or interacted with to measure and improve their effectiveness.

Companies receive aggregated, non-identifying information about the performance of their campaigns, such as the total number of views or clicks. That is, OpenAI may use signals generated within ChatGPT to operate and measure its advertising system, but maintains that that individual information is not passed on to the advertiser.

The other great principle that the company wants to establish from the beginning is the independence between advertising and responses. OpenAI ensures that ads do not influence what ChatGPT responds and that advertisers cannot order, modify or condition the system’s responses. The company’s documentation explains that advertising works through systems separate from the conversational model. Thus, the ads will appear identified as sponsored content and visually separated from the responses.

The distinction aims to resolve a particularly delicate issue in the field of conversational artificial intelligence. Unlike other digital environments, ChatGPT does not simply present a page of results: it directly formulates a response that the user can interpret as a recommendation, guidance or synthesis. Therefore, the separation between organic response and paid space will be one of the keys to determining how users perceive this new format.

OpenAI also expressly clarifies that an advertisement does not amount to a recommendation by ChatGPT nor does it imply that the company endorses the advertiser, their product or their service. Additionally, there will be no ads next to certain sensitive conversations. OpenAI states that it will not show advertising on accounts identified as belonging to minors under 18 years of age. And their policies exclude certain contexts, especially conversations related to personal, high-risk or emotional vulnerability situations in which the presence of advertising could harm user confidence.

The company also contemplates restrictions related to brand safety and content considered inappropriate for advertising insertion.

These guarantees become more relevant as the economic weight of advertising within OpenAI increases. The company precisely presents the independence of responses and the privacy of conversations as principles that must be maintained while expanding the number of advertisers, markets and formats available.

The next step will be personalized advertising.

According to OpenAI, before starting to personalize the ads, the company will ask the user to decide if they want to receive more relevant and personalized advertising. When this option is available and activated, OpenAI may use information that remains within ChatGPT, such as ads that have been interacted with or context from conversations, to determine which advertising is most relevant.

The updated Privacy Policy specifies that, with consent, previous chats can also be used to personalize ads. Users will be able to later modify these decisions from the advertising controls. There is, however, a relevant particularity for Europe. Current OpenAI documentation notes that personalized ads will not initially be available in the European Economic Area or Switzerland.

Advertising, in any case, is already beginning to have its own weight within OpenAI’s business model. The company claims to have surpassed $1 billion in annualized revenue from ChatGPT Ads about 200 days after beginning its trials in the United States. The figure should be understood as an annualized rate of income and not as $1 billion actually earned during those 200 days. Still, it offers a benchmark of the speed with which OpenAI is developing a new source of business alongside consumer subscriptions, enterprise contracts and revenue derived from the use of its APIs.

The ambition goes well beyond those first annualized 1,000 million. According to the information published about its business objectives, OpenAI aims to generate $2.5 billion in advertising revenue during 2026. Advertising thus joins a company whose annualized revenue rate exceeds $40 billion, approximately double that at the end of 2025.

The company believes that the conversational nature of ChatGPT can make advertising especially relevant because it allows it to identify the context in which a person is exploring alternatives or making a decision. The challenge will be to demonstrate that this commercial opportunity can coexist with the trust required by a tool also used for personal, professional and sensitive conversations.

The rapid growth of this business also helps to understand why OpenAI is now formalizing the rules that will govern the relationship between users, advertisers and responses. The issue no longer solely affects an experimental test in the United States: ChatGPT Ads operates in more than 40 markets and the company is progressively opening its purchasing platform to a larger number of advertisers.

Advertising, but not in the higher plans

The presence of ads will depend on the ChatGPT modality used. Ads may be shown to users of the Free and Go plans, while Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education accounts will not include advertising.

OpenAI justifies the introduction of this model as a way to finance free and lower-cost access to the service. The company argues that maintaining these modalities requires a considerable investment in infrastructure and that advertising revenue can help provide greater access to ChatGPT’s capabilities.

There is also an alternative for Free users who do not want to receive advertising without contracting a higher subscription: OpenAI offers a free modality without ads in exchange for lower usage limits and less access to certain functionalities, potentially including image generation or advanced research.

The introduction of advertising thus establishes a new relationship between access, price and attention within ChatGPT: pay a subscription, accept ads to maintain a higher level of free access or use a more limited free version without advertising.