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ChatGPT Ads

Sponsored cards inside ChatGPT answers, shown to Free and Go tier users beneath the response. Ads launched February 2026 on a fixed $60 CPM sold through OpenAI's own sales team; a self-serve Ads Manager entered beta in the US in May 2026, adding CPC bidding and removing the $50,000 test-budget floor that gated the earlier programme. OpenAI reported a $1B annualized revenue run rate within 200 days of launch, across tens of thousands of advertisers.

Will they accept our page?

Conditional

The policy does not name affiliate marketing as prohibited, but it requires that a destination "clearly relate to the advertiser and the offer being promoted" and that landing pages "accurately represent the advertiser, product, or service described in the ad". A page that carries our own research and discloses the commission satisfies that; a thin page whose only purpose is to pass the click along does not. The FTC disclosure obligation is separate and applies regardless.

The policy it was read from →

What the destination has to do

  • The destination must be crawlable by OAI-AdsBot, which is used for landing-page validation and review and which obeys robots.txt. Our own robots.txt currently carries `Disallow: /go/` under `User-agent: *`, so a storefront URL would fail review as it stands — OAI-AdsBot needs an explicit Allow before any ChatGPT ad can point at one.
  • OpenAI advises a directly reachable web page: app-store links, deep links, documents, and destinations requiring login, region-specific access or "unsupported redirects" may not expose enough crawlable content to pass review.
  • Creative and destination must be consistent end to end — an approved ad may not lead to a page introducing content the ad did not disclose.
  • Creative may not imply the assistant is endorsing the product ("ChatGPT recommends", "as the AI suggests").

Buying it

Cost
CPM $25–$60 · CPC $3–$18
Floor
None published — a researched finding, not a blank.
How you get in
both
Where you can buy
Self-serve began in the US and has been extending to India, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.
  • CPM — Launched at a fixed $60 CPM; widely reported to have drifted toward $25 as inventory grew.
  • CPC — Introduced with the self-serve Ads Manager. Roughly $3–5 in ecommerce and retail; $8–18 in software and finance, which is the category our offers sit in.

What you can aim at

  • Conversation context — the ad is matched to what the person is asking about, not to keywords they typed
  • Category and query intent, with comparison questions ("best X for Y") drawing the highest ad rates
  • Country
  • Frequency capping

What comes back

Click parameter utm_source=chatgpt.com&utm_medium=src · pixel yes · server-side yes

A pixel and a Conversions API landed alongside the self-serve beta, reporting purchases, sign-ups and leads in aggregate — OpenAI does not expose individual conversations. UTM parameters are appended automatically, so click-level attribution is available to us without any cooperation from the platform, which is unusual and useful.

Good for

The only large paid surface where the person is mid-question rather than mid-scroll, and comparison questions are the most expensive inventory precisely because they are the most valuable. That is the exact moment a storefront is built for, which makes this the sharpest available test of whether the storefront outconverts a raw link on cold traffic.

Not for

Anything needing a real-time read. Reporting on the managed side arrived weekly or biweekly through an account team, and the self-serve dashboard is a beta.

The honest part

Everything about this platform is less than a year old and the published figures move quarter to quarter — the CPM more than halved inside six months. Software and finance CPCs of $8–18 are the highest of any category, which is a demanding bar for an affiliate margin to clear: a $100 first-month commission absorbs perhaps a dozen clicks before it is gone. Treat the numbers here as a starting hypothesis to measure, not a plan.

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