Traffic source
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.
CPM $25–$60 · CPC $3–$18No published floorSelf-serve or managed
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.
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
- Self-serve or managed
- Where you sign up
- ads.openai.com ↗
- 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.
Read from
- OpenAI — Ad policies Primary read 2026-09-08
- OpenAI Help — Advertiser guidance for allowing OpenAI web crawlers Primary read 2026-09-08
- OpenAI Ads Primary read 2026-09-08
- Search Engine Land — ChatGPT ads expand with self-serve buying (5 May 2026) read 2026-09-08
- Axios — OpenAI ad business reached $1B revenue run rate read 2026-09-08
- Axios — OpenAI launches self-serve ad platform read 2026-09-08