ChatGPT Ads Are Here. Here's How to Get Started Before Everyone Else Does.

Last Friday, OpenAI opened its ad platform to all US advertisers. No invite list. No minimum spend. Just sign up, get verified, and start running ads inside the most talked-about AI product in the world.

Everyone's going to be in here eventually. The brands that figure it out first will have a real edge. Here's everything you need to know — from account setup to your first live campaign.

How to Set Up Your ChatGPT Ad Account

Head to ads.openai.com and sign up with your business email. From there, the process is straightforward, but a few things are worth knowing before you start.

What you'll need to provide:

  • Your legal business name
  • Your business website
  • Your industry
  • Your country (US only right now)
  • Your EIN and physical business address for verification

One important restriction: you cannot sign up as an agency on behalf of a client. The platform currently only allows businesses running ads for themselves. If you're an agency, your client needs to create the account — then they can add you as a user from within the settings.

Once you submit, OpenAI reviews your application manually. Expect 3 to 7 days for approval. That said, some accounts are getting through in as little as 2 days, and there's no clear pattern to the queue right now — we've seen people who applied later get approved before people who applied first.

Our workaround: have multiple people from your business apply simultaneously. It increases the odds someone gets through quickly.

Inside the ChatGPT Ad Manager

Once you're in, the interface is clean and relatively bare bones — but more capable than you'd expect for a platform that launched a week ago.

From the main dashboard you can:

  • Create and manage campaigns
  • Add your billing information
  • Upload your logo (do this — it matters for how your ads display)
  • Add users to your account under settings
  • Set up conversion events under the tools tab

Reporting is minimal right now. Don't go in expecting Google Ads-level dashboards. But the core structure — campaigns, ad groups, ads, and conversion tracking — is already there, which says a lot about where this platform is heading.

Building Your First Campaign

When you create a campaign, you'll choose between two objectives: clicks or views.

If you choose clicks, you'll set a CPC bid at the ad group level. At the campaign level, you'll configure:

  • Daily budget
  • Campaign objective
  • Start date
  • Conversion event

That last one is worth pausing on. The fact that OpenAI launched with conversion event support — purchases, signups, leads — is a strong signal. Most new ad platforms don't offer this until much later. It tells us that campaign-level conversion optimization is coming, and probably sooner than people think.

Contextual Hints: The Most Important Targeting Decision You'll Make

This is where ChatGPT ads diverge from everything you know about paid search. There are no keywords. Instead, you give the platform contextual hints — descriptive prompts that help the system understand what conversations your ad should appear in.

Think of it less like keyword targeting and more like Google's audience signals. You're not telling the platform exactly where to show your ad. You're giving it a starting point, and then it figures out the rest.

Three ways to approach contextual hints:

1. Direct keyword styleDescribe your product and who it's for in plain terms.Example: "Google Ads agency helping e-commerce brands scale paid search"

2. Problem/solution framingDescribe the problem your customer is experiencing when they'd need your product.Example: "E-commerce brands struggling with rising customer acquisition costs looking for ways to improve ROAS"

3. Competitor/category framingPosition around the category or competitor conversations you want to intercept.Example: "Brands evaluating Google Ads partners or considering switching agencies"

Our current take: go broader at first. The platform is new, volume is limited, and you'll learn faster by getting traffic in and watching what converts than by going narrow from the start. AB test different contextual hint approaches across ad groups and let the data tell you what's working.

One more thing worth knowing — there are currently very few restrictions on what categories can advertise. If your business has historically faced policy issues on Google or Meta, this might be a good window to test while the rules are still being defined.

Creating Your Ad

The ad format right now is minimal. You get:

  • One headline
  • One description
  • One square image (your logo, a product image, or a lifestyle shot)
  • One final URL

That's it. ChatGPT may truncate your copy depending on where the ad is placed, so write your headline and description assuming the beginning needs to do the heavy lifting.

You can create multiple ads within an ad group to run copy tests — that option exists. But the creative palette is narrow for now. More ad formats and direct integrations (Shopify is an obvious candidate) are almost certainly on the way.

Setting Up Pixel Tracking (And the Gotcha You Need to Know)

OpenAI's pixel setup is code-heavy but well-documented. Here's the basic structure:

  1. Grab your default website tag from the data sources section and place it in the header of your site — this is your base tracking pixel.
  2. Create a conversion event tag for the specific action you want to track (purchase, signup, lead, etc.) and fire it only on the page where that action happens.

Critical heads-up: the base website tag includes a default conversion event (often labeled something like "registration completed") at the bottom of the code. Remove it. Only the dedicated conversion event tag should fire on conversion pages — having both will mess up your data.

There's no native Shopify integration yet, but that's coming. For now it's a manual implementation.

Where Your Ads Appear — And Who Sees Them

ChatGPT ads appear below the AI's response to a user's query. So if someone asks for authentic Mexican dinner party recipes and your product is hot sauce, your ad surfaces after the response — relevant, contextual, not interrupting.

It's not a search ad. It's not a display ad. It's something in between — closer to a Google text ad with an image, but native to a conversational interface.

Right now, ads are only shown to users on the free plan and the lower-cost Go plan. Plus, Pro, and business plan users don't see ads. That's the audience you're buying for now — though it's reasonable to expect that footprint to expand as OpenAI scales its revenue targets.

Will ChatGPT Ads Actually Work? An Honest Take

Here's where we have to be straight with you: no one has real performance data yet. The platform launched last week. Anyone claiming certainty about what works is guessing.

What we can say:

On CPCs: The current range is roughly $4–6 per click, which is about double what you'd expect to pay on Google search or shopping for most e-commerce or lead gen categories. That math only works if conversion rates are meaningfully higher — which they might be. The intent behind a ChatGPT query is often deeper and more research-driven than a quick Google search. But we don't know yet.

On competition: Right now, there's almost no competition on this platform. That won't last long. Getting in early while CPCs are still being established and the auction is thin is a real advantage.

On brand safety: This is worth thinking about. If someone asks ChatGPT for "the best running shoes" and your brand shows up as an ad but doesn't appear in the organic AI response, that gap might work against you. Conversely, if you've invested in AEO (answer engine optimization) and your brand is already showing up organically, running ads on top of that creates a multiplying effect.

Also be aware: if your product has negative reviews on Reddit or other sources ChatGPT pulls from, that reputation can surface in the same conversation where your ad appears. The AI and the ad are separate signals — the conversation doesn't "know" your ad is there — but the organic content around your brand absolutely affects how you're perceived.

The Bottom Line

ChatGPT ads are real, they're live, and the barrier to entry is lower than it's ever going to be. The platform is bare bones. The data is nonexistent. The rules are still being written.

That's exactly why now is the right time to test.

If you're a US-based business, go to ads.openai.com, get your account application in, and start small while everyone else is still debating whether it's worth it. The brands that learn this platform early are going to have an advantage that compounds, and by the time the rest of the market catches up, you'll already know what works.