How to advertise on ChatGPT: a step-by-step guide for 2026

Step 1: Check that your business can advertise

Two checks come before any setup.

First, your country. Self-service Ads Manager is open only when the legal entity that advertises and gets billed is based in a country OpenAI lists as available. The list covers around sixty countries, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Israel, most of the EU, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, Japan and India.

Second, your category. During the early phase OpenAI focuses on consumer goods, local services, travel and entertainment, and digital products and education. Finance, health and legal services are approved case by case in the US only. Alcohol, gambling, dating, politics and several others are disallowed. If your offer is outside the allowed set, verification will stop you, so check the ad policies first.

Step 2: Open an Ads Manager account

You need an OpenAI login. One account owner per business creates the advertiser account and enters the business name, website, logo and industry, then country, billing currency and time zone.

Choose those last three carefully. OpenAI says they cannot be changed after creation; a mistake means a new account.

Verification runs through Persona and goes into a rolling review queue that also checks your offer against the ad policies. OpenAI cannot speed it up, and a duplicate application only adds confusion. If you work with an agency, you create the account and then invite them.

Step 3: Finish account info and billing

When access is granted, open Settings, then Account info, and set the account name and logo exactly as you want them shown in the ad. Ads will not serve until this is done.

Then add billing: a billing profile and a credit card. Billing is postpay. Your card is charged each time unpaid spend reaches a payment threshold that starts low and rises with payment history, or at month end.

Step 4: Create a campaign

A campaign holds your objective, budget, dates and countries.

• Objective. Views bills per 1,000 impressions, Clicks per valid click, and Conversions optimizes toward one conversion event while still billing per click or impression. It cannot be changed later.
• Budget. A daily budget is an average over a Sunday-to-Saturday week: one day can reach twice the amount, the week never more than seven times it. A campaign-total budget is the stricter cap. The minimum daily budget depends on your currency, for example 25 USD, 15 EUR, 15 GBP or 60 ILS.
• Countries. New self-serve accounts may be limited to their home country at first, until verification clears and a spend requirement there is met.

OpenAI recommends new advertisers start with a daily budget and watch delivery before committing to a total.

Step 5: Build ad groups with context hints and a bid

There are no keywords to buy. Instead, each ad group carries context hints: plain descriptions of the conversations, topics or needs where your offer fits. They guide matching but are not exact-match terms and guarantee nothing.

The ad group also holds your maximum bid. For Clicks campaigns OpenAI suggests starting at a maximum of 3 to 5 US dollars per click, and Ads Manager may show a bid-strength hint. Ads then compete in a relevance-weighted second-price auction, so a strong match still needs a bid, and a high bid cannot buy past a weak match.

Step 6: Write the ad and prepare the landing page

Every ad has the same parts: advertiser name, favicon, title, copy, image and landing page. There is no AI-generated creative; you write and approve it.

Write for the need, not the slogan. Say what you offer, who it is for and when it helps. The landing page counts toward matching and must stay within policy end to end.

Step 7: Track conversions, launch and read results

Reporting inside Ads Manager is aggregated: impressions, clicks, spend, CTR, average CPC, average CPM and conversions. Clicks refresh about every 15 minutes; spend can lag seven to eight hours, so a zero is not proof of no charges.

Before launch, set up conversion measurement and add UTM parameters to your landing page URLs so your analytics can see ChatGPT traffic. Then run for long enough to learn, compare ad groups, and move budget toward the hints and messages that bring real leads.