ChatGPT Ads moved from an (essentially) invite-only experiment to an open marketplace in a matter of weeks. Here's what changed, what's hype, and where we're telling clients to actually test.
A few months ago, running an ad inside ChatGPT required a $200K commitment, a managed-service onboarding, and a polite conversation with OpenAI’s sales team. But now, as of this month, any U.S. business with a credit card can log into ChatGPT’s self-serve Ads Manager and launch a campaign with whatever they want to spend.
That meaningful change opens up ads within ChatGPT’s Free and Go Tiers, which are the bulk of its weekly active base. OpenAI has stated publicly that it aims for $2.5B in ad revenue this year, on its way to a projected $100B by 2030. Whether or not those numbers land, the channel is no longer hypothetical. ChatGPT Ads are buyable, loosely measurable, and show early performance signals worth paying attention to.
There are two distinct ways in, built for different brands solving different problems. Brands shouldn’t question whether to test but instead ask: which door should we walk through, with what budget, and with what aim?
DOOR 1: CRITEO—THE COMMERCE-LED PATH
Criteo became OpenAI’s first ad-tech partner in March; the integration is built for the part of ChatGPT where shopping intent shows up most clearly. When a user asks ChatGPT for product recommendations, gift ideas, or “what should I buy for X,” Criteo’s API surfaces sponsored products pulled from retailer catalogs.
Buying model: Performance commerce, aka Criteo’s home turf. Campaigns are built around product feeds and optimized toward clicks and conversions, managed through the Criteo platform alongside existing retail media spend.
Ad format: Sponsored products. Ads are auto-generated from the same product catalog file that retailers already send to Google Shopping (title, image, attributes), meaning there is no separate creative build. Up to 1M SKUs per advertiser; onboarding typically starts with a sample of around 100.
Targeting: Contextual, powered by Criteo’s commerce graph—roughly $1T in annual ecommerce transactions and around 5B SKUs of behavioral signal. Matching is based on conversation intent, not keywords.
Minimums: Pilot commitments were initially pitched at $50K–$100K, but minimums have since decreased to $25K, meaningfully widening the pool of brands that can run a credible test without overcommitting incremental budget.
Geographic availability: U.S., plus Australia, Canada, and New Zealand through Criteo’s expanded rollout.
Best for: Retailers and DTC brands with a working product feed, especially in the categories Criteo has flagged as outperformers: consumer electronics, lifestyle and wellbeing, and home and garden. In these categories, AI-referred conversion rates are running close to 2x traditional search and CTRs roughly 3x comparable formats in other environments.
DOOR 2: OPENAI ADS MANAGER: THE SELF-SERVE PATH
OpenAI’s own Ads Manager became broadly available on May 5th, 2026.The interface will feel familiar to anyone who has run paid search (campaign, ad group, ad setup) and it is open to any U.S. business with no minimum spend.
- Buying model: Two campaign objectives. Reach (CPM) and Clicks (CPC). OpenAI recommends a starting max bid of $3–$5 per click and defaults CPM max bids to $60. The move from CPM-only at launch to a CPC option is the bigger story than the dollar threshold—it pulls ChatGPT ads closer to how paid search teams actually plan demand.
- Ad format: A single unit called a “chat_card”—a 3–50 character title, up to 100 characters of body copy, an image, a favicon, and a destination URL. No video, carousel, or rich interactive unit in self-serve yet, though OpenAI has signaled more formats are coming.
- Targeting: Contextual, not keyword-based. Advertisers provide “context hints”— broad descriptions of the questions or situations a relevant user might bring to ChatGPT—and the system matches against conversation topics, prior chat history, and previous ad interactions. Budgets, dates, and country live at the campaign level; bids and context hints at the ad-group level.
- Measurement: Reporting covers impressions, clicks, spend, CTR, average CPC, average CPM, and conversions. Functional, but thin compared to what most teams are used to in Google or Meta. What’s more, the attribution story is still being written.
- Best for: Brand and consideration-stage testing, lead-gen advertisers without a product feed, and any team that wants to understand how its messaging behaves inside an AI conversation before the channel matures and competition compresses returns.
OUR POV: TEST, BUT TEST ON PURPOSE
The first-mover narrative around ChatGPT Ads is real, but it is also oversold. The early performance numbers that Criteo has shared—2x conversion rates and 3x CTRs—come from a tightly curated pilot in specific verticals, with a small set of well-funded brands. Treat them as a directional signal, not a benchmark.
Here is what we are telling Stella Rising clients:
If you are a retailer with a clean product feed and meaningful share in consumer electronics, lifestyle, or home categories, the Criteo option is worth a real test now. With minimums lowered to $25K, the format does the creative work for you, the audience shows genuine shopping intent, and the test can be funded out of incremental retail media budget without disrupting existing search programs.
If you are a brand or lead-gen advertiser, the OpenAI self-serve door is the lower-stakes way in. With no minimum and CPC bidding live, you can run a controlled test, with clear context hints, a tight geo, a single landing page, and learn how ChatGPT users respond to your message before the auction gets crowded. We treat this as discovery spend, not a performance line item, until measurement matures.
We are not recommending that clients shift meaningful budget out of Google or Meta. The data is too new, the formats too thin, and the measurement story still under construction. The right frame is incremental discovery: small, instrumented, and learning-led.
WHAT WE’RE WATCHING
A few things will tell us how seriously to take this channel over the next two quarters:
- Whether OpenAI ships richer self-serve formats (video, multi-card, interactive)
- If third-party measurement and attribution catch up to the inventory
- If CPCs hold near the $3–$5 recommended range or compress as auction density grows
- Whether ChatGPT’s Plus and Pro tiers ever open to advertising at all.
ChatGPT ads are no longer a thought experiment, but buyable through two doors, with two different buying logics, built for two different kinds of advertisers. The right move is to walk through the one that fits your business—with clarity around what you will and will not learn.
If you are weighting a ChatGPT Ads test for your brand, our paid search team can talk you through a structured pilot—including budget, hypotheses, and a measurement plan—answering how the test will fit alongside the rest of your demand mix.
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