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Ads are officially coming to ChatGPT. A new article from The Information confirms that OpenAI has already pitched placements in ChatGPT to dozens of advertisers. The report comes on the heels of an announcement last week from the company, which said ChatGPT ads would start rolling out for some users in the U.S. imminently.
For now, ads will only appear on free ChatGPT accounts and for users who have signed up for ChatGPT GO, the product’s latest and cheapest subscription tier, which is $8 per month in the U.S.
Among other details in its pitch, The Information reports that advertisers are expected to pay per view, not per click, as is standard for traditional search engines like Google. Alongside other restrictions, ads will not appear in response to political or health-related queries.
We are starting to test ads in ChatGPT free and Go (new $8/month option) tiers.
Here are our principles. Most importantly, we will not accept money to influence the answer ChatGPT gives you, and we keep your conversations private from advertisers.
It is clear to us that a lot… https://t.co/f9Dv53rWU7
— Sam Altman (@sama) January 16, 2026
OpenAI is not the first conversational AI player to experiment with ads. Perplexity rolled out early ad offerings back in the fall of 2024. Similar to Perplexity, ChatGPT ads will not appear directly in users’ conversations, but instead beneath the response to a prompt. Unlike Perplexity, OpenAI has not announced any plans to share the revenue it earns from ChatGPT ads with the dozens of publications with which it has ongoing licensing deals. These publications help fuel OpenAI’s model training and real-time web browsing capabilities.
As of late last year, ChatGPT has over 800 million weekly active users. The company’s first foray into advertising will start to monetize the large swaths of those users who do not pay for a monthly subscription.
In the wake of the announcement, comments from Sam Altman at a Harvard Business School talk back in May 2024 have resurfaced. “Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me,” Altman said at the time. “I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model.”
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