ChatGPT ads: self-serve is now open in Europe from €15 a day. What the first numbers say, and how to test the channel without burning your budget.
Since early September, any French company can buy advertising inside ChatGPT. An account, a credit card, 15 euros a day. Eight months ago, the entry ticket was 200,000 dollars. So it is the question founders are asking me right now: "should we go?". My answer: yes, small, and with a protocol. But be clear about what you are buying. You are not buying ChatGPT's recommendation. You are buying a sponsored card placed below its answer. And for now, the numbers say those are two very different things.
ChatGPT ads: what has been open in France and Europe since September
On August 24, 2026, OpenAI opened advertising in ChatGPT to 31 European markets: the 27 EU countries plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. For the first few days you had to go through OpenAI's own teams or six agency groups, Publicis, Omnicom, WPP, Havas, Dentsu and Mediaplus, as Digiday reported. Self-serve followed right after. Orange Business, in its La Fabrique guide dated September 21, gives the settings: a minimum daily budget of 15 euros, CPM or cost-per-click buying, a 50-character headline, a 100-character description, a square image. No keywords. You describe to the platform the conversation situations where your ad makes sense, which OpenAI calls context hints.
What interests me is how fast the price dropped. Adweek revealed on January 31, 2026 a minimum commitment of 200,000 dollars to join the US pilot, which launched on February 9 at a 60-dollar CPM. In April, according to PPC Land, the minimum fell to 50,000 dollars and CPMs went as low as 25 dollars. On May 5: self-serve in the United States, click-based bidding, no more minimum. On August 31, Reuters and CNBC reported that OpenAI's ad business had passed one billion dollars in annualized revenue, in under 200 days.
A media owner that goes from a 200,000-dollar commitment to 15 euros a day in seven months is not being generous. It needs thousands of advertisers for its auctions to work. You are invited because the auction room is short of bidders. That is a good reason to go early, and a good reason to go carefully.
Who sees your ads, and who never will
OpenAI's help center is clear on three points that many media plans forget.
- Only Free and Go accounts see ads. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu subscribers see none. If you sell B2B to decision-makers whose company pays for ChatGPT, your target is exactly the audience that will not see your ad.
- No personalized ads in Europe. They are not available at launch in the European Economic Area or Switzerland. The ad is selected from the current conversation, approximate location and language. No history, no profile.
- No-go zones. No ads for accounts identified as under 18, and none near health, mental health or political topics. Advertisers only receive aggregated data: views, clicks.
Translation for a marketing director: this is pure contextual. Closer to search without keywords than to Meta. If your acquisition runs on lookalike audiences and retargeting, nothing you know how to do carries over here.
What the first ChatGPT Ads numbers say
OpenAI publishes no performance benchmarks. So you have to look at what third parties measure, keeping in mind that this data is American and that the platform changes every month.
- Adthena, March 2026. On its clients' accounts, as reported by Campaign on March 19: a click-through rate of 0.91%, against 6.4% on Google Search in the same sector. Seven times lower. And one advertiser that, after several weeks, had managed to spend only 3% of its 250,000 dollars.
- Similarweb, August 2026. A click-through rate measured at 0.50% on August 17, cited by PPC Land. Six months after launch, the click is still rare.
- SE Ranking, August 2026. The most instructive study: 50,006 commercial prompts tested in the United States across 20 sectors. An ad shows up on 25.94% of them. 14.35% of the ads are off-topic. And placements are already concentrated: Booking.com accounts for 62.57% of the ads recorded in travel.
On price, the starting range being quoted for click campaigns is 3 to 5 dollars, which is the one cited by the consultancy fifty-five. Do the math: at 4 dollars a click and a 0.5% click-through rate, you are paying the equivalent of 20 dollars per thousand impressions. That is not cheap for a text format that 199 people out of 200 do not click on.
I am not saying it does not work. OpenAI states that around 20% of queries carry direct commercial intent, and Digiday reports that most of the spend now goes through cost-per-click, which means some advertisers are getting what they need. But a one-billion run rate proves that brands are buying. Not yet that it pays them back.
You are not buying the answer, you are buying the slot below it
This is the point I repeat to every founder. OpenAI's help center puts it in writing: ads run on systems separate from the model, and advertisers have no ability to shape, rank or alter ChatGPT's responses. The SE Ranking study confirms it with facts. When an ad is displayed, the advertiser's brand is mentioned in the answer itself in only 4.44% of cases, and the advertiser appears among the cited sources in only 3.63% of cases.
Read that number again. More than nine times out of ten, the user has just read an answer recommending brands other than yours, and your card shows up right after. You are paying to contradict the advisor they have just trusted.
The real battle therefore stays above the line: being in the answer. That cannot be bought in an Ads Manager. It is built with content that models can read and cite, which is the SEO and GEO work I described in generative engine optimization. And with brand awareness, because a brand whose name gets typed into the conversation does not need to bid on "which solution should I choose". On Deblock, we generated more than 30 million impressions by surrounding the metro and geotargeting mobile within 100 meters. That is the kind of pressure that gets a brand asked for by name. I detailed the mechanism in DOOH and top-of-mind awareness for AI.
Testing ChatGPT ads without burning your budget
Test, yes. Now, while the platform is new in Europe and every euro teaches you something your competitors do not know yet. But as a test, not as a channel.
My rule for a first ChatGPT Ads test
5% of your search budget, no more. Four to six weeks. Cost-per-click buying, never CPM. The pixel and the Conversions API installed before the first euro. One decision criterion, written down before launch: cost per new customer, compared with your non-brand search. If ChatGPT does worse, you cut and come back in six months. You will have paid little to find out.
Do not test at the minimum. At 15 euros a day and 3 to 5 dollars a click, you are buying three to five visits a day. After a month you will have around a hundred clicks and no conclusion. Aim for enough to get a few hundred visits, otherwise keep your money.
Write situations, not keywords. Context hints should read like the questions your customers really ask: "I am looking to replace my invoicing tool", not "invoicing software". Go back to your sales call notes and support tickets, it is all in there already.
Do not trust a single dashboard. Campaign was already reporting Ads Manager reporting glitches in March. Compare billed clicks with the sessions in your analytics, and declared conversions with those in your back office. The platform is young, the checking is on you.
Look at the answer above your ad. Type the questions you are bidding on yourself, from a free account. If ChatGPT recommends three competitors and you show up underneath, your problem is not an advertising problem.
What I tell founders
ChatGPT Ads is a real media channel being born, and it will probably be in your plans two years from now. Today, it is a test line. Put 5% of your search budget into it, measure like an accountant, and spend the rest of your energy on being the brand the answer cites. The sponsored card is rented by the click. The place in the answer is earned, and whoever holds it does not need to pay for the one below.
If you want to know where you stand, let's talk during a free audit: we can start by looking at what ChatGPT answers to your customers' questions, and who it recommends. And to set your break-even threshold before launching the test, the ROAS calculator does the job in two minutes.
