Chapter 06 — User Ad Controls

Free + Go users in eligible markets can manage their ad experience under Settings → Ad Controls. Five actions are exposed.

Available controls

• Turn ads personalisation on or off.
• Dismiss individual ads.
• Send feedback on an ad.
• See why a particular ad was shown.
• Delete ad data with one tap.

Ad controls are only available for Free and Go users in eligible markets. Plus / Pro / Business / Enterprise / Edu plans are ad-free and have no ad controls.

Personalisation off

When personalisation is off, ads still appear — but they are matched only against:

• The current chat thread.
• Basic context (approximate location, language).

Memory is not used. Past chats are not used. Ad history is not used.

For an advertiser, this is the hardest case to win and the one most worth designing for. A meaningful share of users will leave personalisation off. Those impressions are decided on conversational fit alone.

What this means for ad-group context_hints

context_hints (Chapter 16) is one of the few advertiser-controlled signals OpenAI documents. Hints describe when the ad should be relevant — ["productivity", "team collaboration"] is the example in OpenAI’s docs. They do not behave like Google Ads keywords (no exact match, no broad match, no negative keywords). They bias relevance.

When personalisation is off, the relevance signal collapses to: current chat content + your context_hints + the contextual fit of the page you’re driving traffic to. That is the entire surface. Get those three right and the impressions are recoverable. Get them wrong and there is no behavioural signal to fall back on.

Dismissal and feedback

Per-ad dismissal and feedback are user-side controls; the advertiser sees the aggregate effect (lower CTR, lower delivery, sometimes lower placement) rather than per-user actions. Chapter 19’s Insights endpoints surface the aggregates.

Deletion

A user can delete their ad data with one tap. The aggregate metrics on the advertiser’s side persist; the user’s individual contribution is removed from future personalisation. Advertisers are not notified of individual deletions and cannot work around them.