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Deployments

ChatGPT Ads go live in 31 European markets, with self-serve access to follow

OpenAI's largest ad expansion to date opens Monday through agency partners; an Ads Manager for smaller advertisers is promised later this summer.

By Ben Krauss·Daily desk lead·

OpenAI switched ChatGPT Ads on across 31 European markets today, including Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Austria. It’s the platform’s largest geographic expansion since the February U.S. pilot, and the clearest signal yet that OpenAI intends to be a global performance channel rather than an American experiment.

For now, European buys route through agency and technology partners. Digiday reports the initial roster includes Publicis, Omnicom, WPP, Havas, Dentsu and MediaPlus. A self-serve Ads Manager is promised “later this summer,” per OpenAI’s newsroom post, with no firm date. The U.S. version launched this spring with a $50,000 minimum that has since been dropped.

Enterprise CMO Colin Fleming told an Adweek briefing that ChatGPT now has one billion weekly active users, that 20% show direct commercial intent, and that ad revenue has grown more than 25% since the start of August. Search Engine Land’s framing is the more useful one for advertisers: this is a channel where prospects describe goals, constraints and preferences in natural language, which is a richer intent signal than a keyword. Digiday reports that cost-per-click, introduced since launch, now accounts for most of the ad spend.

The economics still aren’t settled. Victor Batista, senior director of paid media at Jellyfish, called the platform “very much unproven.”

That’s the founder’s decision compressed into a phrase. Ads run only on Free and Go plans; Plus, Pro and Enterprise stay ad-free, which narrows the audience but concentrates it on users actively researching purchases. Following the one-billion-user milestone earlier this month, the category placements inside conversational queries are being claimed now, through the holding companies, before the self-serve window opens and CPCs discover their real ceiling. Waiting is a position too.

Sources