What ChatGPT Ads Is
What ChatGPT Ads Is
ChatGPT Ads is OpenAI’s paid placement product inside ChatGPT. Sponsored placements appear below an organic answer when the conversation is a relevant match. They are clearly labelled as sponsored and visually separated from the model’s response. Advertisers do not influence what ChatGPT says — only what appears below it.
There are three things to keep separate when reading the rest of this encyclopedia:
1. The user-facing product. What a Free or Go user actually sees, who is eligible to see it, how relevance is determined, what privacy guarantees are in place, and what the user can control. Section 1 covers this end-to-end.
2. The measurement stack. OpenAI ships two ways to capture conversion events on an advertiser’s site: a browser-side JavaScript Pixel and a server-side Conversions API. Both feed a single event taxonomy. Section 2 documents both, the events they support, the data shapes, and how to deduplicate when running them in parallel — which is the recommended pattern.
3. The Advertiser API. The programmatic interface to Ads Manager. It exposes campaigns, ad groups, ads, files (creative uploads), insights, and account metadata, all behind bearer-token auth at https://api.ads.openai.com/v1. Section 3 walks every endpoint with full request and response shapes.
What this encyclopedia is not:
- Not a tutorial on creative copy. The Ads policy and the constraints on title/body length are documented, but the craft of writing a 50-character title is outside scope.
- Not a strategy guide for which products to advertise. CRS, audience design, and offer-market fit live in the CRS Encyclopedia.
- Not advice on Gemini Ads or any other LLM-native ad surface. As of 2026-05-06, ChatGPT Ads is the only one buyable. When Gemini opens, this encyclopedia stays focused on OpenAI; a parallel one would cover Gemini.
When OpenAI ships changes — new event types, new ad creative formats, new rate limits, new geographies — chapters get re-verified against source and the last_verified field updates. The full source list is in every chapter’s frontmatter.