Advertisements on ChatGPT in Poland: what this means for brands

This text is part of the guide Brand visibility in AI: how it works and how to measure it.

Since when have adverts been running on ChatGPT?

OpenAI began on 9 February 2026 with trials in the United States, involving logged-in adult users of the Free and Go plans (first announcement regarding the adverts). The next steps, according to OpenAI:

• In May 2026, Ads Manager was launched – a self-service dashboard that made advertising accessible to small and medium-sized businesses,
• On 31 August 2026, self-service shopping had expanded to Europe, India, the Middle East and North Africa, and adverts were running in over 40 countries (OpenAI statement),
• Poland is in List of countries with access to Ads Manager, provided that the advertiser and the payer are based in a country on this list,
• In just under 200 days since their launch, the adverts have, according to OpenAI, generated annual revenue of one billion dollars and are being used by tens of thousands of advertisers,
• 5 October 2026, OpenAI has announced a new visual advertising format, initially tested in the US whilst generating images, for users on the Free and Go plans.

How does advertising work on ChatGPT?

Adverts are shown to adult users on the Free and Go plans. Paid plans, from Plus upwards, are ad-free. The system matches adverts to the topic of the current conversation and, depending on the country and the user’s settings, also to previous conversations and interactions with adverts. Advertisers do not have access to the content of conversations, chat history or storage; they only receive aggregated data on impressions and clicks. Adverts do not appear alongside sensitive topics such as health, mental health or politics.

From the advertiser’s perspective, it works much the same as in other advertising systems. Most campaigns are billed on a per-click basis or optimised for performance. Pixel and the Conversions API are used for measurement, whilst product feeds, geographical targeting and custom audiences are used to target campaigns. Selected advertisers can exclude conversations containing specific phrases.

Does advertising on ChatGPT influence which brands the response recommends?

According to OpenAI, no. Adverts are always labelled, displayed separately from the responses, and do not influence what ChatGPT says. The new visual format is also set to remain separate from the image generated by the user.

This highlights the most important point for brands: you still cannot buy your way into the answer itself. Whether a model mentions your company depends on what they have learnt about it during training and what they find online at the moment they give their answer. The article describes how this selection process works How AI chatbots choose the brands they recommend. Why a model might be familiar with a brand and yet not recommend it is explained Knows the brand, but doesn’t recommend it.

Advertising or presence in response: how do they differ?

These two channels are not mutually exclusive. Advertising gives you control over the message and a quick start. Building a presence organically takes longer, but it also works on Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, where adverts from ChatGPT’s Ads Manager do not appear.

What do the adverts on ChatGPT mean for agencies?

Agencies are gaining a new channel to sell to clients and facing a new question from them: „If you can buy adverts on ChatGPT, why bother working on your presence in the responses?” The answer is in the table above. Advertising does not change what the model says about the brand, and a customer who sees a labelled advert will often read the response next to it anyway.

In client reports, these channels must be kept separate. Campaign results are shown in Ads Manager. No ChatGPT provider tool displays the presence of responses, so this must be measured independently, using a fixed set of queries and across several models. How to do this manually is described in How to check whether AI recommends your brand. Details of our collaboration with agencies can be found on the website Aelo for agencies.

How can you measure brand presence in responses alongside adverts?

At Aelo, we measure brand presence in the responses from four models: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. We ask the questions without mentioning the brand name (neutral scan), measurements are taken daily, and a full report is produced once a month. The module Visibility shows how a brand’s presence changes over time and in relation to the competition, and we use the results to plan activities in Tickets. It’s up to you to decide which parts of this you’ll put into practice.

Since October, ChatGPT has also been running on a new model, and users on the Free and Go plans – that is, those who see adverts – are given a different model to paying users. We discuss this in the article GPT-6 in ChatGPT: what it means for brand visibility.

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FAQ

Sources

• OpenAI, Testing adverts in ChatGPT: https://openai.com/index/testing-ads-in-chatgpt/
• OpenAI: A milestone in expanding access to AI (31 August 2026): https://openai.com/index/expanding-access-to-ai-with-chatgpt-ads/
• OpenAI Help Centre, Ads Manager Availability: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001245-ads-manager-availability
• OpenAI, ‘Building advertising for the way people use AI’ (5 October 2026): https://openai.com/index/new-chatgpt-ads-format-and-measurement/