What is the latest on ChatGPT ads, and when did each market open?

The current state, in one minute

ChatGPT ads are live and buyable through self service in 89 countries as of 31 October 2026, the United Arab Emirates and the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council among them. The platform began as a United States only pilot on 9 February 2026, moved to self serve Ads Manager Beta in May, expanded to Europe, India and 15 Middle East and North Africa markets across August and September, and added seven Asia Pacific markets by October. Alongside market access, the mechanics advertisers plan around have changed three times: daily budgets now average over seven days rather than capping each day individually, an automated Maximize results bid strategy is now the default for new ad groups, and conversion optimised campaigns can now be billed on impressions as well as clicks. Custom audiences, built from your own customer lists, and a set of named measurement partner integrations, are also live, and OpenAI now documents a ChatGPT Ads Manager plugin for working on campaigns from ChatGPT or Codex. Sponsored Agents, a chat based ad format, remains in a closed alpha OpenAI is not accepting requests for. Everything on this page is dated, sourced and updated as OpenAI's own pages change, not written once and left alone.

How to read this page

Entries marked OpenAI come from OpenAI's own pages. Entries marked third party come from independent trackers, named in each row. We update this log when OpenAI changes something, and the date at the top moves. Every dated claim on this page is either sourced directly to an OpenAI page or attributed to the named third party tracker. We do not add a date we cannot point to, and where a subject is genuinely unclear, including reports we could not verify against OpenAI's own documentation, we say so directly rather than filling the gap with a plausible sounding date.

The full timeline: from pilot to live platform

We use the phrase "from pilot to live platform" deliberately rather than "from leak to live platform." OpenAI's own materials describe February through April 2026 as a focused pilot, not a leak, and that is the language we hold to. See the next section for how we treat the earlier reports some other sites describe as a leak.

What some trackers call the November 2025 leak

Some third party sites and social posts reference an earlier disclosure, commonly dated to around November 2025, describing OpenAI's plans to introduce advertising before the confirmed February 2026 pilot began. We are not going to repeat the specific details those reports attribute to that disclosure, because we cannot verify them against an OpenAI source, and this page's rule is that every dated claim traces to OpenAI's own documentation or a named tracker checking OpenAI's own public pages. A pre-launch report is a different category of source from either of those: it is, by definition, describing something before the company confirmed it directly.

What we can state with a source: OpenAI's own first confirmed date for ads in ChatGPT is 9 February 2026, in the United States, per its help centre. If you are reading a claim elsewhere about an earlier internal plan, treat it as unconfirmed until you can trace it to OpenAI's own statement, the same standard we apply to every other row on this page.

Confirmed versus unconfirmed: what we hold to OpenAI's own documentation

OpenAI has since documented a ChatGPT Ads Manager plugin, now dated in the timeline above. If OpenAI publishes documentation for a map feature, or any other capability currently unconfirmed here, we will add it with its own source and date the same way every other row on this page is sourced. Until then, treating an unsourced claim as fact would break the standard this whole page is built on.

What shipped in August 2026

August was the month the platform stopped being a US and Oceania test and became a genuinely international product, and it happened in two distinct moves rather than one announcement.

Late in the month, OpenAI's self serve platform reached 31 European markets, per Index Lab's tracker, which logged them on 24 August. Then, on 31 August, OpenAI published its own account of the platform's scale: a 1 billion dollar annualised revenue run rate reached in under 200 days, tens of thousands of advertisers, more than 1 billion weekly active ChatGPT users, more than 50 technology and measurement partners, and availability in over 40 countries through its sales team and partner network at that point, alongside the newly announced self service expansion to India, Europe and the Middle East and North Africa. The post itself names regions, not countries; the first 11 country MENA wave, Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar and Tunisia, comes from Index Lab's log of OpenAI's availability table.

Read those figures for what they are: OpenAI's own framing of its own momentum on the day it chose to publish them, not an independently audited market figure, and not a benchmark for what any individual advertiser's campaign will do. OpenAI states directly elsewhere in its documentation that the platform does not yet have performance benchmarks across advertisers, industries or campaign types. The 31 August post is a scale announcement, useful for understanding how fast OpenAI is opening the platform, not a results announcement.

The late-August wave: automation, surfaces and new markets

Market access was not the only thing moving in this window. Three product changes landed in the same stretch, none carrying its own press release date, each documented instead in OpenAI's help centre.

Maximize results, an automated bid strategy that sets and adjusts bids toward a campaign's selected goal, became the default bid strategy for eligible new ad groups. OpenAI states plainly that it prioritises result volume and does not guarantee a specific CPA, CPC or ROAS, so it is a volume tool, not a cost control. Advertisers with a specific bid limit to stay within can use the manual or advanced bid controls instead, such as Bid Cap on a conversion campaign, though OpenAI says Bid Cap is not the price charged for a conversion or a guaranteed achieved cost per acquisition. Both are covered in our bidding strategies guide.

Conversion optimised campaigns gained a second billing option. Where the platform previously billed conversion campaigns per valid click (oCPC), OpenAI's help centre now also documents oCPM, impression billed conversion campaigns, intended to capture conversions that follow someone seeing an ad without a further click on it. OpenAI's own framing is that impression billing can better reflect how people actually discover and evaluate a product through ChatGPT: someone sees an ad while exploring an idea, returns later on their own, and converts without a second click for the campaign to be credited against under click billing alone. Neither option changes what triggers optimisation, both still optimise toward one chosen conversion event per campaign, and OpenAI is explicit that a conversion optimised campaign does not mean paying per conversion under either billing model. In its rewritten conversion article, OpenAI now says impressions optimise for more conversions, including those driven by views and clicks, and that selecting clicks will lower your conversions.

Alongside ads.openai.com, a second way in had appeared in OpenAI's account setup guide by 21 September and, by early October, had its own help article: the ChatGPT Ads Manager plugin, used from ChatGPT or Codex. OpenAI says it connects to the Ads Manager accounts you can access, drafts and previews ads, creates or updates campaigns, ad groups and ads only after you confirm the exact change, analyses performance, and runs one time or recurring reviews that are recommendation only and never change the account. Where self serve setup is available, it can guide a business advertiser through creating one ad account for its own business, while identity verification, billing, payment, tax and appeals stay in Ads Manager, and OpenAI says the plugin cannot override verification, policy review, account eligibility or delivery decisions. OpenAI's rewritten account setup guide now says to have one person create the advertiser account, then invite anyone else who needs access, and to create a separate account for each advertiser when you manage several. We saw this direction first hand: opening a fresh Ads Manager account of our own on 21 September 2026, the sidebar carried a promo card inviting us to try Ads Manager in ChatGPT to create, edit and manage campaigns.

September 2026: audience control, and what we would not claim beyond it

The clearest, best sourced product addition this month is custom audiences. OpenAI's help centre now documents building an audience from an uploaded list of customer or prospect emails, phone numbers, hashed identifiers or Google Advertising IDs, then using that audience for campaign level inclusion targeting, campaign level exclusion, or an ad group bid multiplier between 0.1x and 10x for people who match it. Inclusion targeting and bid adjustments need at least 25,000 matched users; smaller lists can still be used for exclusion. This is the first named, documented audience control beyond context hints, location and platform that OpenAI has published for ChatGPT ads, and it is genuinely new capability, not a rename of something that already existed. See our custom audiences guide for the full upload and eligibility rules.

Where our sourcing runs out is anything described elsewhere as a map style placement or feature. We looked for it in OpenAI's own help centre as of the date verified above and did not find it documented there. A ChatGPT ads plugin, by contrast, is now documented by OpenAI and covered in the section above. We are naming them here specifically because the checklist we build this page against asks us to, and because saying nothing would look like an oversight rather than a deliberate choice. Our position is not that these do not exist; it is that we have not found an OpenAI source for them, and this page does not carry a claim we cannot point to. If that changes, this section updates with a source and a date like everything else here.

Product mechanics that changed, independent of market access

Access is not the only thing that has moved. These mechanics affect how a campaign is planned no matter which country it runs in.

None of these changes were announced with a press date the way market access was. We date them here to when OpenAI's help centre articles describing them were current as of this page's verified date, not to a specific rollout day, because OpenAI has not published one.

The measurement partners now documented

Beyond the OpenAI Pixel and Conversions API, which remain the core measurement path covered in our conversion tracking guide, OpenAI's help centre now documents setup steps for a specific list of external measurement partners.

Each partner's setup differs in detail, generally involving either an Ads Manager API key, created under Settings, then General, then API Keys, or a Pixel ID and Conversions API key from the Conversions section of Ads Manager, entered into the partner's own platform before mapping the events to send. OpenAI states it will update its help centre as additional partner integrations become available, so treat this list as the set documented on the date verified above rather than a permanent ceiling. Our measurement partners guide covers the full setup steps for each one.

Where the Gulf and Middle East sit on the availability list

Fifteen of the 89 countries on OpenAI's self service availability table, checked on 31 October 2026, are Middle East or North Africa markets.

Every Gulf Cooperation Council country is on this list. OpenAI's own note on the availability page states that self service requires the legal entity that will advertise and be billed to be based in one of the listed countries, which is why a UAE business, not the country of the audience it wants to reach, is what determines eligibility for a UAE registered account.

Why the beta label is not just a formality

OpenAI describes the platform's own stage plainly: a focused pilot from February through April 2026, then expansion through self serve onboarding in Ads Manager Beta. OpenAI states it will continue evolving delivery systems, inventory, ad formats and how advertisers buy, manage, measure and optimise campaigns, and that ongoing improvements to delivery systems and models can cause delivery and spend to fluctuate during the beta. For conversion optimised campaigns specifically, OpenAI states its goal is to improve conversion outcomes, not simply use the full budget, meaning a campaign can under-spend by design rather than by error.

Practically, this means a setup that worked in August is not guaranteed to behave the same way in October, independent of anything the advertiser changed. It is also why this page exists separately from the how-to guides: the mechanics move, and a dated log is the only honest way to track that.

Signing up before your country is listed

OpenAI's FAQ addresses a question worth stating plainly: creating an Ads Manager account does not grant access before your country is supported. If your country is marked Coming Soon or is not listed, you can still create an account at ads.openai.com, and OpenAI says it will notify you when access becomes available. For a UAE business this is now moot, since the UAE is on the available list, but it matters for anyone testing from a country still absent from the table, and it explains why an account existing in the system is not evidence that a market has opened.

What changed for users

OpenAI says ads may appear on ChatGPT's unpaid plan and the Go plan, never on Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise or Edu, and never to accounts identified as belonging to people under 18. Personalised ads were not initially available in the European Economic Area or Switzerland, and for campaigns targeting the EEA or Switzerland OpenAI's campaign creation documentation currently advises against using custom audiences while ads personalisation is unavailable there. See does ChatGPT have ads for the full breakdown of what users see and control.

What is in test

Sponsored Agents. OpenAI's help centre describes them as an advertising format that lets people chat with an AI representative of a business inside ChatGPT, opened from an ad. OpenAI says the format is available only to selected advertisers in a limited alpha test, that it is not accepting early access requests, and that a person may see one as a user even though most advertisers cannot yet buy one. See Sponsored Agents in ChatGPT ads for everything OpenAI has published about the format so far.

What OpenAI says comes next

More markets, and additional formats, objectives, buying options and measurement capabilities. It also says it will explore new ways for businesses to interact with consumers more natively in ChatGPT. No dates are given. Our reading of the pattern so far: OpenAI has moved from a single market test to 89 self service countries in about eight months, and each wave of market access has landed alongside a wave of platform features, custom audiences and dual conversion billing arriving in the same stretch as the MENA expansion, rather than before or after it. We expect the next market sized announcement to bundle both again, but that is our inference from the pattern, not something OpenAI has stated.

What this means for UAE advertisers right now

Every Gulf Cooperation Council country is now on the self service list, and the product a UAE advertiser signs up for today already has custom audiences, dual conversion billing and averaged daily budgets built in, mechanics that were not all live when the platform first opened. A UAE company can run campaigns across the region from one account, though a new self service account is often initially limited to its home country until identity verification is approved and a spend threshold is reached there, so do not assume day one access to Saudi Arabia or Qatar from a fresh UAE account.

The practical work stays local either way: Arabic creative, a page per market, prices in the local currency, and a separate context hint set per country rather than one hint list reused everywhere. AED is the billing currency for a UAE entity, SAR for a Saudi entity, and QAR for Qatar, each with its own minimum daily budget. See ChatGPT ads in the UAE for the UAE specific setup path, and our ChatGPT ads service for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf if you are running more than one Gulf market from one team.

How to treat this page if you are mid test

If you have a live campaign, the rows most worth watching are budget mechanics, bid strategy changes and new targeting controls such as custom audiences, not market expansion announcements. A new country does not affect a UAE campaign already running. A change to how daily budgets pace, a new default bid strategy on new ad groups, or a targeting option that did not exist when you built the campaign, can quietly change delivery, spend or who sees your ads on a campaign that has not itself been touched. Re-read your ad group's bid strategy and campaign's audience settings after any dated change on this page lands, rather than assuming your existing setup is untouched.

How we keep this page current

1. Check OpenAI's own documentation first

   We check whether OpenAI's own help centre or a numbered blog post states the change directly. If it does, we cite that page and date the entry to it.

2. Fall back to a named third party tracker, labelled as such

   If OpenAI has not published a date, we check whether a named third party tracker has logged one, and we label the row third party rather than presenting it as OpenAI's own statement.

3. Check what we can check ourselves

   Where we can check a fact directly, such as a row in the country availability table or a label inside our own Ads Manager account, we do that check on the date shown at the top of this page and label it as our own check.

4. Leave out what we cannot source

   We do not add a row based on a single unverified report, a screenshot without a source, or a forum post. If we cannot point to where a claim came from, it does not appear on this page, and a subject we cannot source at all is marked unconfirmed rather than left to imply we did not look.

Sources worth bookmarking

We rebuild this page from OpenAI's own availability table and help centre change logs, cross checked against the third party trackers named above where OpenAI has not published a date itself. If you want the primary source rather than our summary, OpenAI's Ads Manager Availability page and its 31 August 2026 announcement post are the two documents this page leans on most. Both pages carry their own "Updated" timestamps that move independently of this page, so if you are reading this more than a few weeks after the verified date at the top, check those two pages directly before relying on a row here.

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