How to Advertise on ChatGPT: Setup, Steps and Costs

Most guides to this platform go fuzzy exactly where the work starts, somewhere around business verification. This page is the practical half of how to advertise on ChatGPT: from an empty account to a live campaign, in order, with the waiting and the costs made explicit. For the wider picture, who sees the placements, why they exist and whether the channel deserves serious budget yet, start with our complete ChatGPT ads guide. This one assumes you have decided to test.

A reality check before step one. Everything below describes a beta running in a single country, the American test that started in February 2026, and the rules have shifted repeatedly mid-flight. Budgets went weekly in late July, tracking opened up the same month, and formats gained features between drafts of this article. We date the moving parts so you can tell what may have moved again.

Can you run ads on ChatGPT right now?

Yes, if you run a real business that can pass verification. OpenAI sells placements through a self-serve dashboard at ads.openai.com, officially named Ads Manager and still wearing a beta label. Signup is open rather than invite-only, but nothing runs until verification clears, and the ads themselves currently serve only inside the American test.

The advertiser side is documented in OpenAI's own account setup guide for the beta. The audience side is narrower than most people assume. Since February 9, 2026, placements have shown only to adults in the United States using the Free and Go plans. Every paid tier stays clean, so your ad will never reach a Plus or Pro subscriber.

That narrows the qualifying question usefully. If your buyers include Americans on free accounts, there is inventory for you today. If your market sits entirely outside the US, the dashboard may let you build, but the audience does not exist yet, and no clever targeting changes that.

What do you need before you apply?

Four things, according to OpenAI's setup documentation: an OpenAI account, the legal name your business is registered under, a physical address, and tax registration such as an EIN. Agency guides add a fifth in practice, a live website that lines up with those details, plus a short wait while verification happens.

The wait has a name. WebFX and StubGroup both report that the identity check runs through Persona, a third-party verification service, and typically clears in one to three business days. Nothing else in the whole flow takes that long, which settles the order of operations: submit verification first, build everything else while it churns.

Your website earns its place on that list too. Verification ties a name, an address and a domain to one real entity, and the agency guides treat a live site as part of how a business proves itself. It is also where your pixel will live, which matters two sections from now.

How to run ads on ChatGPT, step by step

Seven steps separate an empty account from a live campaign: sign in, verify, add billing, configure, target, upload creative, launch. OpenAI publishes a quickstart for the first campaign that walks the same ground inside the product. Expect half an hour of actual work and a few days of waiting.

1. Sign in at ads.openai.com. The buying platform hangs off a standard OpenAI account, so use one your business controls, not a personal login.
2. Submit business verification. Legal name, physical address, tax registration, then the Persona identity check and the one-to-three-day wait the agencies report.
3. Add billing once clearance comes through.
4. Configure the campaign. Pick a bidding model and set the budget, remembering that since late July the daily figure behaves as an average across seven days, not a hard cap.
5. Write the targeting. Context hints plus geography, with optional customer lists. The next section covers this in full, because it is where search habits break.
6. Upload creative in one of the two formats, Static or Product.
7. Launch, then leave it alone. Give the system days of data before rewriting anything.

The creative step deserves a note before you reach it. Both formats render as one card shape: name, image, headline, a line of description. Text limits are tight, and we are deliberately not printing exact figures, because published sources contradict each other and the builder enforces whatever is true this week. Since late July, Product placements can also carry a card showing a price and star rating.

	Static	Product
What it is	One fixed creative for your business or offer	A placement built around a specific product
What it needs	An image plus headline and description text	Product details, with price and star rating able to render since late July
When to pick it	Services, bookings, lead generation	Anything a buyer would compare on price

How do you write context hints that work?

By describing situations instead of search terms. A context hint is a short piece of plain writing about the conversations where your offer fits, and StackAdapt's walkthrough of the platform frames it as briefing the system on relevance rather than bidding on strings. Nothing matches exactly, and no slot is promised.

An example makes the shift concrete. Say you sell accounting software. Keyword instinct says list the obvious terms, invoicing app, bookkeeping tool. A hint reads more like a scene: a small business owner buried in unpaid invoices, dreading a tax deadline, asking how to stop doing the books by hand. You are handing the model a situation it can recognise mid-conversation.

Write several hints and vary the situations, because you cannot force your way in. There is no exact match option. That said, a well-written hint still competes against everything else the system finds relevant, and placement stays the model's call, which is the hardest habit for search advertisers to drop.

Craft-wise, writing for a model rewards what prompt writing rewards: specificity over cleverness. Plain sentences beat slogans here, because the first reader is software deciding relevance, not a customer deciding taste.

Specific nouns help it place you. Adjectives mostly do not.

Two layers sharpen things further. Geography, for instance, goes all the way down to country, region, DMA (a US media market) or postal code. And since July 7, 2026, you can upload first-party customer lists, plain or hashed emails and phone numbers, a rollout Search Engine Land covered as it landed. OpenAI's custom audiences guide asks for roughly 25,000 matched users before a list becomes usable, recommends 100,000, and lets you include, exclude or adjust bids against the people on it.

Keywords ask what someone typed. A good hint describes the moment your business becomes useful.

The cost to run: a $25 floor and $2 clicks

Plan on $25 a day per campaign as the floor, the figure StubGroup names in its guide and the number most people asking about ChatGPT ads cost are actually after. Bidding works per click, per thousand impressions or per conversion, and daily budgets settle as a seven-day average.

Click prices come with one public data point. StubGroup, spending its own money on early campaigns, says clicks have come in at $2 or more. That is a single agency's ledger, not a market rate, but it retires the fantasy of penny traffic from an underpriced new channel. Beyond that, benchmarks do not exist yet, and anyone selling you a CPC forecast for this platform is guessing.

The averaging rule changes how you read the numbers. A heavy Wednesday is fine provided the week lands near your figure, so judge tests by the week, never the day. At the floor, a two-week experiment costs roughly $350, which buys you real impression data, a first read on click quality, and a feel for how your hints actually land in conversation. That is the fair frame for ChatGPT paid ads in mid-2026: tuition money first, performance budget later, and no shame in calling the whole thing a paid lesson.

How do you track conversions?

Through OpenAI's pixel on your site or its conversions API in your stack, and one of the two must be live before conversion-optimised campaigns become available. The capability started as a June 2026 beta restricted to accounts with tracking already in place, then went wide around July 24.

The July release carried more than a wider rollout. Geo exclusion arrived, letting you fence off regions you cannot serve. Advanced matching now accepts hashed customer data to tighten attribution. App campaigns gained measurement through AppsFlyer and Adjust, and a Bulk API appeared for accounts operating at volume. Trade coverage from Search Engine Land and MediaPost tracked each piece as it shipped.

Order matters more here than the feature list. Install the pixel during the verification wait, not after your first campaign ends, because without conversion data you are judging a brand-new channel on clicks alone.

Clicks flatter every new channel.

Your first week, in order

Day one, apply and submit verification. While Persona works, install the pixel. Then draft five context hints covering five different situations, and build one Static creative against a landing page that keeps whatever promise the hint makes. When clearance lands, add billing, set the campaign at the floor, launch, and then sit on your hands until a full week of data exists, because judging it earlier tells you nothing.

Then hold one thought as the numbers come in. Learning how to advertise on ChatGPT is half of a larger skill, because the conversations where your ad might appear are the same conversations where ChatGPT already recommends businesses unpaid, based on what it can find and understand about them. Making companies legible to models is what we build for clients, our guide to AI marketing agents shows that machinery at work, and it keeps compounding while a paused campaign simply stops. Run the $25 test, take the lesson, and spend equal effort on being the answer rather than the interruption.