ChatGPT ads are six months old. Theirs is the largest of several auctions now selling placements inside AI assistants — Microsoft's Copilot, Amazon's Rufus, and a handful of startup networks run their own — but it has the most public paper trail, so it is the one this note covers. Prices there have moved fast, and the pricing model itself has changed once. Almost every number in circulation comes from trade press or agencies rather than from OpenAI. What follows is what the public record supports.
The price timeline
The pilot began February 9, 2026, serving logged-in adult users on the Free and Go tiers. Launch pricing was a $60 CPM default max bid. It did not hold. Within ten weeks the $60 had eroded to as low as $25 — roughly a 58% decline. A leaked StackAdapt deck from late March offered select buyers CPMs as low as $15.
On April 15, 2026, mid-collapse, OpenAI pivoted to cost-per-click bidding. That move matters beyond the mechanics. A falling CPM is visible to every buyer; a CPC is not comparable across periods. The unit of sale changed at exactly the moment the old unit was declining in public.
Where things sit now, per trade and agency reporting:
- CPM: ~$45 average within a $25–$60 band as of late July, depending on market competitiveness. The floor firmed after April; the sharp decline appears over.
- CPC: OpenAI's recommended starting bid is $3–$5. Vertical variance is reported as ecommerce and retail at $3–$5, software and finance at $8–$18. The same source describes the auction as second-price and relevance-weighted, with bids under $3 frequently failing to win impressions.
- Billing is postpay — you are charged after delivery, at thresholds or on scheduled dates.
One caveat covers all of it: OpenAI publishes no rate card, and there is no independent audit of clearing prices on this surface. Every post-April figure above comes from agencies and trade guides. Treat them as directional.
The minimum-spend story is contested
The pilot launched with a $200,000 minimum spend commitment. From there the sources diverge. PPC Land reports the minimum was cut to $50,000 from an initial $250,000 in April. Other trade sources say the minimum was eliminated entirely when self-serve opened on May 5, leaving a $25 minimum daily budget in the US.
These claims conflict and neither is confirmed by OpenAI. The likeliest reconciliation we can offer is that $50K describes the managed/partner tier while the $25/day floor describes self-serve, though no source confirms that reading. If the number matters to your planning, open an account at ads.openai.com and read what it says.
What you get for the money
The unit is small. An ad carries advertiser name, favicon, a headline of about 16 characters, a description of about 32 characters, one image, and a landing page URL. Logos cannot be the primary visual; product or lifestyle photography is preferred.
There are no keywords to buy. Campaigns use "context hints" — natural-language phrases describing relevant conversation topics — which guide but do not guarantee delivery. Ad selection also weighs landing page content, title, and copy for relevance, and the auction is described as relevance-weighted rather than a pure bidding war — tighter match between ad, hints, and landing page lowers cost per placement. Bidding harder will not force delivery, and an irrelevant ad can lose it at any bid.
The audience is narrower than "ChatGPT users." Ads serve only to Free and Go tier users — Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education subscribers never see them, nor do users under 18. Free users can also opt out of ads entirely in exchange for fewer daily messages. Any reach estimate built on total ChatGPT usage is wrong by a large, unknown factor.
The performance evidence
Public practitioner receipts are scarce. The two most substantive ones point in opposite directions.
The positive pole is Opascope's published benchmarks: roughly $60,000 spent over 15 complete days against roughly $89,000 in revenue — a 1.49x blended ROAS, about $1.72 CPC, 2.35% conversion rate. Read the fine print. Daily ROAS swung between 0.2x and 2.9x. The client is anonymous, the window is two weeks, and the publisher is an agency selling ChatGPT-ads services. It is the best-disclosed receipt in public, with real spend and real denominators. It is also self-interested data, and we weigh it as such.
The negative pole is a month-long DIY test reported by an r/shopify merchant: CPC roughly triple what they pay Google, CTR less than a tenth of Google's, verdict "not worth it at all." It was the top-scored practitioner comment in the thread, and others in the same thread report abandoning within about two weeks — "just pretty expensive clicks," "it just burned $."
A measurement-focused commenter in a related thread put the honest frame on all of it: ChatGPT ads are "too new for anyone to have real performance data, so treat anyone claiming results as selling something". That includes the agency benchmark above, and it includes this note's sources generally.
Attribution is the hard part
ChatGPT no longer closes the purchase loop. OpenAI retired Instant Checkout around March 6, 2026, with roughly 30 merchants live, stating the initial version "did not offer the level of flexibility that we aspire to provide" and refocusing on product discovery. Purchases now route to merchant apps or back to your own site.
So every conversion happens off-platform. OpenAI offers a Conversions API, pixel tools, and UTM support, and reporting is aggregate only — impressions, clicks, spend, CTR, CPC, CPM, conversions; conversation content is never shared. The first outside measurement partner, LiveRamp, arrived in June 2026 — US-only, limited to mutual clients, doing conversion piping rather than independent verification. Nobody neutral currently adjudicates whether this channel performs. If you spend without your own attribution wiring in place, you will be arguing about the results with no referee.
Should you spend?
We don't think a clean answer exists yet.
The channel is young and probably mispriced. The $60→$25 CPM collapse, falling entry barriers, and expansion to eight advertiser countries in six months describe an auction busy recruiting buyers, and auctions in that state tend to reward early testers without staying in that state for long.
It is also unforgiving to casual DIY. The visible pattern in merchant reports is two-to-four-week abandonment on bad CPC/CTR economics, while the visible positive numbers come from parties with something to sell. The relevance weighting can quietly throttle a sloppy ad. Context hints take tuning. And because attribution lives off-platform, you may not find out either happened until the budget is gone.
What we would consider defensible: a small budget, a fixed test window and success thresholds written down before you start, conversion tracking and UTMs wired before the first dollar, and results judged against your own analytics rather than the platform's dashboard alone. If the numbers clear your threshold, scale carefully. If they don't, stop on schedule.
No one — including us — can currently tell you this channel works. We read that as a reason to test it like a skeptic rather than a reason to ignore it.
MadContext is a research practice covering advertising on AI surfaces. Nothing here is a performance guarantee; every figure links to its source and self-reported numbers are labeled.