Startups

ChatGPT Ads reaches 89 countries and 100,000 advertisers, with SMBs now a 'material share'

OpenAI's self-serve Ads Manager is live in 26 new markets, giving small businesses a direct path to the 1.2 billion weekly users deciding what to buy inside ChatGPT.

By Giulia Donatello· Startups & funding·2026-10-24·3 min read

Photo: Unsplash / Zulfugar Karimov — Smartphone screen showing the ChatGPT app interface

OpenAI switched ChatGPT Ads on in 26 new countries on October 21, bringing the paid surface inside its chat product to 89 markets and giving small businesses in most of the developed world a direct, self-serve route to the 1.2 billion people OpenAI says use ChatGPT each week to “explore ideas, compare options and make decisions.”

The scale pitch is the whole pitch. For roughly a decade, performance marketers have paid for attention at the top of a funnel (Meta) or at the bottom (Google search). ChatGPT Ads sits somewhere unfamiliar: inside the deliberation itself, next to the model output that’s actively shaping what the user buys.

OpenAI says more than 100,000 advertisers have run campaigns in the roughly eight months since the format launched, and that small and medium businesses now represent a “material share” of the base. The May introduction of Ads Manager, alongside cost-per-click bidding, pixel-based tracking, and a Conversions API, is what made that possible without an agency on retainer. Ads appear only on the Free and Go plans; Plus, Pro, and Enterprise stay ad-free.

The caveat is in the numbers themselves. The Information, citing New Street Research analyst Dan Salmon, pegged ChatGPT at roughly 60,000 active advertisers in early October. The gap between cumulative and active suggests a lot of early testers tried the channel and stopped, likely because measurement is thin. An OpenAI spokesperson told AdExchanger the company is “building out measurement alongside the expansion.” CPM pricing launched at $60 per thousand impressions, which is premium territory and raises the bar on attributable return.

For owner-led businesses already running paid, the sensible read is to treat ChatGPT Ads as the third seat in a bench that now also includes Meta’s Muse-powered small-business targeting and Google’s automated promotions in Search and PMax. A new visual format with larger images is already being tested in the US against people using ChatGPT for image generation. The channel will keep shifting under anyone standing on it.

Sources