The Pulse
OpenAI Expands ChatGPT Ads to 26 More Countries
OpenAI is extending ChatGPT Ads to 26 additional countries, bringing the service to 89 markets worldwide. The company says ads will appear on Free and Go plans while paid Plus, Pro and Enterprise plans remain ad-free.
AI.info Team · Written with AI · fact-checked ·
OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT advertising while promising that advertisers cannot see users’ conversations and that ads do not shape the chatbot’s answers. The company announced on October 21 that it would add 26 countries, bringing ChatGPT Ads to 89 markets worldwide. The expansion puts sponsored placements within reach of more businesses as people use ChatGPT to compare products and services.
26 markets bring ChatGPT Ads to 89 countries
OpenAI says the new markets include 14 additional countries in Latin America, following earlier launches in Mexico and Brazil. Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru are among the additions. The company also named Nigeria, South Africa, Serbia, Ukraine, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Pakistan as markets joining the service.
The announcement does not list all 26 countries in its main text. OpenAI says advertisers in the new markets can use technology partners or self-service access through Ads Manager. The expansion follows earlier launches across Europe and Southeast Asia and Taiwan.
OpenAI says more than 100,000 advertisers have run campaigns on ChatGPT since ads launched just over eight months ago. The company also reports that more than 1.2 billion people use ChatGPT each week. Ads will appear only on the Free and Go plans; Plus, Pro and Enterprise subscriptions will remain ad-free.
Ads meet users while they weigh purchases
OpenAI’s pitch to advertisers centers on the way a conversation can develop from a broad need into a specific choice. The company gives the example of someone planning meals for marathon training who narrows options based on diet and cooking time; an ad for grocery delivery could appear during that process. The placement is intended to reach people while they are considering options, rather than only after they have settled on a search term.
Asmita Dubey, L’Oréal Group CDMO, described the company’s interest in testing the format: “Testing early with OpenAI enables us to pioneer helpful experiences and journeys, from discovery, to evaluation, to agentic commerce, ensuring L’Oréal remains the most trusted, expert answer wherever beauty conversations take place.” Her statement reflects the advertiser’s stated goal; OpenAI’s announcement does not provide campaign results or independent evidence about how well the placements perform.
OpenAI draws a line between ads and answers
OpenAI says conversations remain private from advertisers, customer data is not sold, ads are labeled and kept separate from ChatGPT’s answers, and advertising does not influence those answers. That separation is central to the company’s argument for placing paid messages alongside conversations that may include product research. The company’s announcement describes those protections as its approach, rather than offering an outside audit of their operation.
A separate OpenAI engineering post published the same day describes an ad-selection system that runs separately from answer generation. It says the system uses a custom, post-trained language model to interpret conversation context and select ads, while a separate service handles ad selection. OpenAI also says ChatGPT Ads reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate less than 200 days after launch, a figure that shows the commercial stakes behind the expansion.
More formats and buying options are planned
OpenAI says its next phase includes developing additional ad formats, campaign objectives, purchasing options and measurement capabilities. The company also says it is exploring ways for businesses to interact with consumers more natively in ChatGPT. It did not give launch dates or detailed specifications for those planned changes.
For now, the expansion extends access for advertisers in 26 markets while keeping the stated eligibility line at Free and Go. OpenAI’s announcement leaves the full country list unspecified in the post’s main text, but gives the global total: 89 countries.