By Timothy Jacqmin — Co-Founder, Nexuro Digital · August 2026
TL;DR
- ChatGPT Ads will run in Belgium from Monday 24 August 2026, as part of an expansion to 31 European markets announced by OpenAI on 18 August 2026.
- Ads are shown only to users on the Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise subscriptions remain ad-free, as do accounts identified as belonging to minors.
- The format is restrained: a sponsored card below the answer from ChatGPT, with the advertiser name, favicon, title, description, image and link. It is clearly labelled and does not influence the answer ChatGPT gives.
- Targeting uses no exact-match keywords but context hints: you describe the conversations and needs where your offering is relevant. Selection runs through a relevance-weighted second-price auction — a large budget does not make up for an off-topic ad.
- The crucial point for a Belgian business: as of 20 August 2026, self-serve Ads Manager is NOT yet open to advertisers based in Belgium. Access currently goes through the OpenAI Ads Solutions team, agencies and technology partners; OpenAI says European self-serve will open "later this summer". Your customers will therefore see the ads before you can buy any.
Six months after the U.S. pilot launched in February 2026, OpenAI is opening advertising inside ChatGPT to Europe. For a Belgian SME, two questions matter: is this a serious new acquisition channel, and how do you actually get started? Here is what OpenAI's official documentation says, what is genuinely accessible from Belgium today, and the steps to open an Ads Manager account.
What exactly happened?
On 18 August 2026, OpenAI announced the expansion of ChatGPT Ads to 31 European markets, including Belgium, with delivery starting on Monday 24 August 2026. It is the largest expansion of the programme since the pilot launched in the United States in February, followed by eight additional markets.
The platform timeline, in short:
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| February 2026 | Advertising pilot in the United States, invitation only |
| 5 May 2026 | Self-serve OpenAI Ads Manager Beta opens (United States) |
| May – August 2026 | Expansion to eight markets (Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, United Kingdom) |
| 24 August 2026 | Ads delivered across 31 European markets, including Belgium |
OpenAI frames this monetisation as funding free and low-cost access to ChatGPT. For advertisers, the argument lies elsewhere: reaching people as they explore, compare and decide, rather than at the moment they type three keywords into a search engine.
What does an ad inside ChatGPT look like?
A ChatGPT ad is a sponsored card shown below the answer, made up of the advertiser name, its favicon, a title, a description, an image and a link to the landing page. No video, no interstitial, no ad inserted into the text of the answer.
Three principles set by OpenAI govern the format:
- Separation: ads are clearly labelled and distinct from answers; advertising does not influence what ChatGPT replies.
- Privacy: advertisers have no access to user conversations, and OpenAI states that it does not sell customer data.
- Control: users can turn off ad personalisation, or choose a paid ad-free subscription.
In practice, this means an advertiser will never know which question triggered its ad. That is a major difference from Google Ads, where the search terms report remains the main optimisation lever.
How ChatGPT decides which ad to show
There is no exact-match keyword: the system selects ads through a relevance-weighted second-price auction, drawing on the context of the conversation, the landing page, the title, the ad copy and the "context hints" provided by the advertiser.
Context hints are written at ad group level. They are free-form descriptions of the conversations, topics and needs where your product is relevant — not a list of keywords to be matched. OpenAI describes them as "broad thematic signals": they guide matching without guaranteeing delivery on a specific phrasing.
The strategic consequence: relevance weighs more than the bid. An ad closely aligned with a conversation can beat a less relevant ad bidding higher. The job is therefore not to buy volume, but to describe a need precisely and answer it with a legible offer.
What does ChatGPT Ads cost?
Three buying modes coexist: CPM (cost per thousand impressions) for visibility, CPC (cost per click) for traffic, and oCPC (conversion-optimised CPC) to steer delivery toward a measured action after the click. The maximum bid is set at ad group level.
| Objective | You pay | Optimised for | Use it when |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPM | Per 1,000 impressions | Reach and awareness | You want exposure at scale |
| CPC | Per valid click | Clicks and traffic | You want people on a page |
| oCPC | Per valid click | Conversions after the click | You have a measured conversion event |
Benchmarks published by OpenAI:
- For a CPC campaign, the recommended starting maximum bid is 3 to 5 USD per click.
- The minimum daily budget depends on the account currency: 25 USD in the United States, 15 GBP in the United Kingdom, 25 AUD, 25 CAD, 25 NZD, 2,500 JPY, 40 BRL, 150 MXN, 25,000 KRW. No amount in euros has been published yet — one more signal that European self-serve billing is not open.
Watch out for one management trap: the campaign total budget is a cap, not a pacing control. OpenAI states that spend is not spread evenly across the period and can add up quickly if your ads find many opportunities. For a first test, a daily budget is the safer choice.
For comparison, a Google Ads click in Belgium costs a median of 1.88 € according to our study of 264 Belgian commercial keywords. A bid of 3 to 5 USD therefore places ChatGPT Ads at the top of the Belgian market — to be judged on traffic quality, not on the price of the click.
Who can buy ChatGPT Ads from Belgium?
As of 20 August 2026, self-serve Ads Manager is open to businesses based in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States. Belgium is not on the list yet.
In practice, three routes exist for a Belgian advertiser:
- Go through the OpenAI Ads Solutions team or a partner: for the European launch, access runs through OpenAI's sales team, agency partners (Publicis, WPP, Omnicom, Havas, dentsu, MediaPlus) and technology partners.
- Register your interest: OpenAI provides an advertiser form (openai.com/advertisers) to be notified when your country opens. OpenAI indicates European self-serve will follow "later this summer".
- Prepare the ground now: landing page, conversion measurement, access for OpenAI's crawlers (see below). These are prerequisites, not options — and they serve your organic visibility anyway.
The situation is asymmetric, and that is the most useful piece of information in this article: from 24 August, your Belgian customers see ads inside ChatGPT, but your Belgian competitors cannot yet buy any through self-serve. The window to get ready is measured in weeks.
Creating an OpenAI Ads Manager account: the 5 steps
Here is the official path, as documented by OpenAI. Note that nothing is delivered until all five steps are complete.
Step 1 — Create the account at ads.openai.com
Go to ads.openai.com and follow the sign-up flow. An OpenAI account is required; you can create one during sign-up. Use a work email address, and have the account created by the person who will own it: only one person should create the advertiser account, the others are invited afterwards.
Step 2 — Enter your business details and pass verification
You first enter the business information (legal name, website, logo, industry), then the account settings: country, currency, time zone. Identity and business verification is then carried out through the provider Persona.
The trap not to miss: country, currency and time zone can no longer be changed after the account is created. If they are wrong, you have to create a new account. Also check that the entity you enter is the one that will be billed.
Your application then goes into review. OpenAI considers in particular whether your products and services are eligible under its ad policies, and warns that it may take time — applications are handled in a rolling queue. Do not submit a duplicate application: it does not speed anything up and confuses which account is the right one.
Step 3 — Complete your account information
Once access is granted by email, go to Settings > Account info and check that the account name and logo are exactly as you want them to appear in the ad unit. Until this step is done, ads will not serve.
Step 4 — Set up billing
Two sub-steps: create a billing profile (legal name, invoice delivery email, full address including region and postal code) then add a payment method (credit card). Without complete billing, nothing is delivered.
Step 5 — Invite your team
In Settings > Users > Invite, add the email addresses of the people who need access to the account. Worth noting for agencies: an agency does not create the account on behalf of its client, it is invited as a user. And if you manage several brands, each advertiser requires its own account, created with a different email address — the same user can then be invited to several accounts and switch between them.
Launching a first campaign: the structure to know
Ads Manager uses a classic three-level hierarchy — campaign, ad group, ad — but each level carries settings specific to ChatGPT.
| Level | What you define there |
|---|---|
| Campaign | Objective (CPM, CPC, oCPC), daily or total budget, start and end dates, target countries, platforms (iOS, Android, Web), custom audiences to include or exclude |
| Ad group | The theme, the maximum bid and above all the context hints |
| Ad | Title, copy, image, landing page, tracking parameters (UTM) |
Two creation modes coexist: the guided flow step by step, and bulk upload through a campaign schema template, useful beyond a handful of campaigns.
Every campaign goes through review before delivery. If an ad is marked "Not serving", hover over the status: the cause is usually a review in progress, incomplete account verification, an exhausted budget, a passed end date or a payment issue.
Once live, Ads Manager reports: impressions, clicks, spend, CTR, average CPC, average CPM and conversions (if measurement is set up), in table, chart and CSV export.
Writing effective context hints
This is the heart of the craft on this platform. OpenAI's recommendations, translated into practice:
- Describe situations, not isolated words. "Belgian SME that must move to Peppol electronic invoicing and is looking for an integrator" beats "invoicing".
- Cover the different ways one need is phrased: your customers do not describe their problem in your industry vocabulary.
- Keep one ad group to one theme. Two genuinely different products or audiences call for two ad groups.
- Add what the title and copy do not say: hints complement the creative, they do not repeat it.
Writing effective ads
OpenAI stresses a point that feels counter-intuitive coming from search: produce creative volume and variety. Several title and copy variations per offering give the system more opportunities to find a relevant conversation. Each variation must defend a different angle, not restate the same message.
The rest comes down to three rules: a concrete benefit rather than a vague hook, a specific landing page (product or content page, never the homepage by default), and strict consistency between ad and page — review checks both.
Measuring results: pixel, API and UTM
ChatGPT Ads has its own pixel (OpenAI Pixel) and a server-to-server Conversions API, on top of classic UTM parameter tracking. The logic mirrors the Google and Meta pixels: install the tag on the site, declare the conversion events, then optimise delivery toward those events (which is what makes the oCPC objective usable).
Three implementation tips:
- Set up measurement before launching, not after. Without a measured conversion, you can neither judge the channel nor use oCPC.
- Add your UTMs to every destination URL: they persist through the click and let you isolate ChatGPT traffic in GA4, independently of the figures reported by the platform.
- Compare against your other channels on cost per lead, never on CPC — the method we detail in Measuring your marketing's real ROI.
The technical prerequisite almost nobody checks
Your landing pages must not block OpenAI's crawlers: OAI-AdsBot validates ads and assesses their relevance, OAI-SearchBot feeds organic citations inside ChatGPT. If your robots.txt, your web application firewall or your CDN blocks them, your ads can be rejected — and your site stays invisible in ChatGPT's answers.
This is also the hinge between advertising and organic visibility in AI engines. Paying to appear below an answer does not replace being cited in the answer itself: these are two distinct mechanics, and the second cannot be bought. We measured it on the Belgian market in the state of GEO in Belgium 2026, and we explain the difference in SEO vs GEO.
Sectors that will not be able to advertise
OpenAI's ad policies currently prohibit entire categories, and they are stricter outside the United States. Worth checking before investing any time:
- Prohibited: adult content and dating apps, alcohol and tobacco, gambling, recreational drugs (cannabis included), political content, counterfeit goods, individual job or property listings.
- Restricted, and "generally prohibited outside the United States": financial services, health and medical services. For a Belgian SME in those sectors, access is, as things stand, closed.
- Baseline that applies to everyone: no misleading promises, no unfounded comparisons, no imitation of the ChatGPT interface. Review covers the title, the copy, the image and the landing page.
Should you go for it? Our reading
Yes to test, no to shift a budget. ChatGPT Ads is explicitly in beta: OpenAI acknowledges that there are no performance benchmarks by sector yet, and says the delivery system, formats and tooling will keep evolving. A sensible Belgian advertiser draws three decisions from that:
- Prepare now, spend later: landing pages, conversion measurement, OpenAI crawlers allowed. Those projects serve your acquisition either way.
- Ring-fence a test budget, with a learning objective rather than immediate profitability — and a daily budget rather than a total one.
- Do not strip the channels that work. The trade-off between organic search and advertising is unchanged: we cover it in SEO or Google Ads: which one should your SME choose.
FAQ
Is ChatGPT Ads available in Belgium?
Ads are delivered to Belgian ChatGPT users from 24 August 2026, as part of the expansion to 31 European markets announced by OpenAI on 18 August 2026. However, as of 20 August 2026, businesses based in Belgium cannot yet open a self-serve account: access goes through the OpenAI Ads Solutions team, agency partners or technology partners. OpenAI says European self-serve will open later this summer.
How do you create a ChatGPT Ads Manager account?
The path has five steps: create the account at ads.openai.com with a work OpenAI account, enter your business details and pass identity verification through Persona, complete the account name and logo under Settings then Account info, set up a billing profile and a payment method, and finally invite your team members. Campaigns only run once all these steps are complete and the account is approved.
How much does advertising on ChatGPT cost?
ChatGPT Ads offers three buying modes: CPM (cost per thousand impressions), CPC (cost per click) and oCPC (click optimised for conversion). OpenAI recommends starting a CPC campaign with a maximum bid of 3 to 5 USD per click. The minimum daily budget depends on the account currency, for example 25 USD in the United States or 15 GBP in the United Kingdom. No minimum in euros has been published yet.
Who sees ads inside ChatGPT?
Only users on the Free and Go plans see ads. Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise subscribers do not, nor do accounts identified as belonging to people under 18. Users can also turn off ad personalisation.
Can you target keywords in ChatGPT Ads?
No. The platform does not use exact-match keywords. You write "context hints" at ad group level: descriptions of the conversations, topics and needs where your offering is relevant. These hints guide matching without guaranteeing delivery on a specific phrasing, and the final selection runs through a relevance-weighted second-price auction.
Does ChatGPT Ads replace Google Ads?
No, the two logics are complementary. Google Ads captures an intent expressed in keywords, with a search terms report that allows fine optimisation. ChatGPT Ads captures a moment of exploration and comparison, with no visibility into conversations. At this beta stage, with no sector benchmarks published, ChatGPT Ads should be treated as a test channel with a dedicated budget, not as a replacement.
Should you allow OpenAI's crawlers on your site?
Yes, if you intend to advertise. OAI-AdsBot checks ads and assesses their relevance, and your landing pages must not block it or they may be rejected. OAI-SearchBot feeds organic citations inside ChatGPT: blocking it means excluding yourself from the answers. Check your robots.txt file, your web application firewall and your CDN rules.
Sources
- OpenAI — ChatGPT Ads expands across Europe, 18 August 2026: https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-ads-expands-across-europe/
- OpenAI Help Center — Ads in ChatGPT: The Basics: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001207-ads-in-chatgpt-the-basics
- OpenAI Help Center — Ads Manager Beta Account Setup: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001213-ads-manager-beta-account-setup
- OpenAI Help Center — Create Campaigns for ChatGPT Ads (objectives, budgets, minimums by currency): https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001210-create-campaigns-for-chatgpt
- OpenAI Help Center — Create Ad Groups for ChatGPT Ads (context hints): https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001211
- OpenAI Help Center — Ads Manager Availability: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001245-ads-manager-availability
- OpenAI — Ad policies: https://openai.com/policies/ad-policies/
- Nexuro Digital — Google Ads CPC benchmarks Belgium 2026 (DataforSEO analysis of 264 Belgian commercial keywords, July 2026).
About the author
Timothy Jacqmin: Co-founder of Nexuro Digital, a digital marketing agency and Official Odoo Partner (BE-FR-LUX), founded with his brother Bryan Jacqmin.
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