Since 24 August 2026 you can run ads inside ChatGPT in Germany. The rollout covers 31 European countries and was announced on 18 August. Since 31 August, access also runs through the self-service ads manager instead of only through OpenAI's ads solutions team and agency partners. If you're wondering whether to put budget into ChatGPT Ads – short answer: probably yes. But not before you've clarified a far more important question.
What's happening right now
In less than 200 days after launch, ChatGPT Ads reached an annualised revenue run rate of one billion US dollars and is now used by tens of thousands of advertisers. The format is deliberately plain: a so-called "chat_card" that appears below the answer, clearly labelled as sponsored and visually separated from the chat itself. Ads and the chat model run on separate systems – advertisers can neither shape nor influence the answers.
Important context: only users on the Free and Go tiers see ads, while Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu stay ad-free. OpenAI states that around 20 percent of all ChatGPT conversations have commercial intent – that's the audience in question here.
The limits hardly anyone mentions
Before you shift your budget, two constraints that matter for many mid-sized and e-commerce brands:
The real point: paid does not replace organic
And this is where it becomes relevant for you as a brand, whether you test or not. OpenAI explicitly separates paid ads from the actual ChatGPT answer – anyone who wants to be named organically as a brand or information source still needs relevant, structured and trustworthy content. Two separate layers of visibility emerge in AI systems: the bought ad below the answer – and the organic mention inside the answer itself.
> An ad slot can be bought. A recommendation from ChatGPT cannot.
As soon as ad slots exist, the organic mention becomes the only placement that cannot be bought – a trust signal no budget can manufacture. That is exactly what many companies are overlooking right now: they debate media budgets for ChatGPT Ads without knowing how visible they are in the organic answers at all.
There's another effect: if a user clicks your ad and then keeps researching, but ChatGPT doesn't classify you as trustworthy in the organic answer, you lose – the paid click fizzles out because the organic foundation is missing.
What this means for you
Paid and organic visibility in AI search are not an either-or. But the order in which you tackle them decides whether your budget works:
PromptScan covers exactly that first step – making your own AI visibility measurable across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude. Before you invest in ads, it's worth looking at what AI systems already say about your brand today.