01How a ChatGPT ad works
The ad appears below the end of an answer, marked as sponsored and kept apart from the answer itself. It carries your business name and logo, a headline, a short description, an image and a link to your page. OpenAI says ads do not change what ChatGPT answers, and advertisers never see anybody's conversations, only totals such as views and clicks.
Instead of keywords you write context hints: the topics, questions and words of the conversations where your business would be useful. ChatGPT treats them as a guide, not an exact match, and weighs them with the conversation, your ad and your landing page. Ads are shown to logged-in adults on the free and Go plans, and are kept away from chats about health, mental health and politics.
02What it costs
- Minimum budget: $25 a day in the United States. OpenAI sets a minimum per market and currency.
- The daily budget is an average over seven days. A single day can spend up to twice it, and a week never more than seven times it. At the minimum that is about $750 a month.
- Three ways to pay: by views (a price per thousand), by clicks, or with the system aiming at a conversion you track, still billed by the click.
- What a click costs: OpenAI recommends a starting maximum of $3 to $5 a click, so the minimum budget buys roughly five to eight clicks a day.
- No benchmarks yet. OpenAI says there are no performance norms across industries, and that delivery and spend can move while the beta changes.
For comparison, a click on Google for many local businesses costs a few dollars too; see what Google Ads cost for your kind of business.
03Who can buy them
You sign up at OpenAI's Ads Manager, where the business that advertises and is billed has to be based in a country on OpenAI's list. The United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are all on it, with the United Kingdom, much of Europe and Asia. The business is verified before ads run, and reporting arrives with a delay: views and clicks every few minutes, spend after seven to eight hours.
04Who they suit, and who they do not
| Likely worth a test | Probably not yet |
|---|---|
| People ask before they buy: "which is better", "what should I choose" | People search when they already know: "plumber near me now" |
| You serve a whole region or country | You serve a few streets: there is no radius around an address |
| About $750 a month to spend on a test, beside what already works | A small budget that has to bring calls this month |
| You track enquiries or sales on your own page | No tracking: you would not know what the money did |
| Software, services, products that need explaining | Regulated offers OpenAI restricts, such as many financial and health services |
05ChatGPT ads beside Google search ads
| Google search ads | ChatGPT ads | |
|---|---|---|
| How you choose where it shows | Keywords, matched to what people type | Context hints, a guide rather than a match |
| Blocking the wrong searches | Negative keywords, for everybody | Only for some qualifying advertisers |
| What you learn | The searches that triggered the ad | Totals: views, clicks, spend, conversions |
| Local targeting | Down to a radius around your shop | Country and region; no radius |
| Least you can spend | No minimum | $25 a day on average |
| How settled it is | More than twenty years of data | A beta that changes as it grows |
06How to run a first test
- Track first. Set up OpenAI's conversion measurement on the page the ad sends people to, and add UTM tags to the link so your own analytics shows the traffic too.
- Write hints like questions. The things a customer would ask an assistant before choosing a business like yours.
- Pay by the click at first, at a cap you can afford, and keep the budget at the minimum for two or three weeks.
- Judge it on enquiries, not clicks, and compare what one costs with what it costs from Google.
07Where Adducta stands
Adducta is an advertising department run by an AI agent, for businesses in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Today it plans and runs Google search campaigns: where the money goes, what the ads say, which searches to buy and block, what a lead should cost. It does not buy ChatGPT ads yet. We are testing them on our own campaigns first, and this page will say when that changes.
Write my plan is free, needs no account and no card, and shows what the agent would do for your business on Google before anything is spent. Comparing tools? See AI tools to run Google Ads for a small business.