All we know about ChatGPT ads
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI-Ready CMO
OpenAI finally crossed the Rubicon. Last week, the company announced it will start testing ads in ChatGPT for free-tier and Go ($8/month) users in the US “in the coming weeks.” Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscribers will remain ad-free. Sam Altman, who once called ads “uniquely unsettling” paired with AI, has apparently made peace with his discomfort. Infrastructure doesn’t pay for itself.
The format, at least for now, looks restrained: sponsored products appearing at the bottom of responses, clearly labeled, contextually relevant to your conversation. Users can dismiss them, ask why they’re seeing them, and opt out of personalization entirely. OpenAI promises ads won’t influence ChatGPT’s answers. They also promise your conversations stay private and won’t be sold to advertisers. Whether you believe those promises is between you and your cynicism.
And there’s not much marketers can do right now.
OpenAI is expected to launch a self-serve advertising platform in Q1, initially for select advertisers, with broader access rolling out “later” in 2026. Until that happens, we are all spectators. You can’t buy placements. You can’t optimize campaigns. You can’t even see if your products are being considered. It’s a black box with a “coming soon” sign on it.
Building an ad platform people actually trust is brutally hard. Google and Meta spent decades iterating on auction systems, quality scores, fraud detection, and advertiser tools. OpenAI is starting from scratch—with a team of ad veterans from those same companies, sure, but also with a user base that chose ChatGPT partly because it wasn’t trying to sell them things. Thread that needle wrong, and they risk eroding the trust that makes the platform valuable in the first place.
Sure, the opportunity is very real. Eight hundred million weekly users, high-intent queries, and conversational context that make traditional keyword targeting look primitive.
If OpenAI gets this right, it could become the most valuable advertising real estate outside of Google Search. But “if” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
For now, this is a story to watch, not a budget to allocate. When the self-serve platform opens up—and when we actually see pricing, targeting options, and performance data—then we can talk strategy. Until then, keep your product data clean, your narratives sharp, and your expectations measured.
— Torsten and Peter
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