Launch

OpenAI Confirms: ChatGPT Ads Will Launch in 31 European Countries Next Week

co-written by newsrooms.ai19. August 2026, 08:59

What had been taking shape since Monday is now official: OpenAI is bringing advertising in ChatGPT to Europe next week. ChatGPT Ads will go live in 31 countries, among them Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Austria. According to the company it is the largest expansion of its young advertising business so far, and it comes with a whole set of restrictions.

Access Initially Only Through Sales and Partners

Advertisers will not get at the system freely in the opening phase. Bookings will run through the OpenAI Ads Solutions team, through agency partners and through technology partners. Self-service access via the Ads Manager is set to follow later this summer.

Ads Only on Free and Go

Ads will be shown exclusively to users on the free tier and on the low-cost Go plan at 7.99 euros per month. The Plus, Pro and Enterprise tiers remain ad-free, as do Business and Education accounts. OpenAI argues that advertising helps fund free and low-cost access to ChatGPT.

There is also an ad-free variant of the free plan, though it comes with lower usage limits and reduced feature access, meaning fewer messages per day and no access to tools such as image generation or deep research.

Contextual at Launch, Not Personalised

For the European market OpenAI is taking a staged approach. At launch, ads are explicitly not personalised. According to the privacy terms, selection draws on the current topic of the ongoing conversation, approximate location, device type, time of day and language. Past chats and stored memories are explicitly not used at launch. As the legal basis for this generic advertising, OpenAI cites legitimate interest under the GDPR.

Personalisation is meant to follow in a second step, and only after users are actively asked. Those who opt in will see ads that additionally draw on the current chat thread including personalised model responses, on their own interactions with ads, and on past chats and memories. The relevant settings sit under Settings > Ad controls, where ads data can also be deleted. OpenAI states it can take up to 30 days for that data to be removed from its servers. The help centre article on ads in ChatGPT confirms that personalised ads are not initially available in the EEA or Switzerland.

Where Ads Will Not Appear

OpenAI has defined several exclusions. Ads are not eligible to appear near sensitive or regulated topics such as personal health, mental health or politics. Political advertising is currently not permitted at all. Also excluded are temporary chats, the ChatGPT Atlas browser and accounts OpenAI believes belong to minors. That is determined in part through age prediction, which factors in stated age, account age, times of use and the general topics a person discusses.

Ads are placed below a response, labelled as “sponsored” and visually separated. According to OpenAI, advertising does not influence the model’s answers. Advertisers receive only aggregate metrics such as views or clicks, no chats, no memories, no names, email addresses, IP addresses or precise locations. Conversations remain private from advertisers, the company says, and customer data is not sold. As a framework, OpenAI points to its own ads principles.

Open Questions Under Data Protection Law

The ad-free free plan with its reduced limits is likely to be the point where the debate begins. In its Opinion 08/2024 on “consent or pay” models, the European Data Protection Board held that platforms must offer a genuine, equivalent alternative without behavioural advertising. Whether a stripped-down free variant meets that standard is an open question. The trade publication PPC Land points to ongoing proceedings against similar models run by European media companies.

The controller for processing the personal data of users in the EEA and Switzerland is OpenAI Ireland Limited, based in Dublin. That makes the Irish Data Protection Commission the competent supervisory authority. Processing takes place on servers outside the EEA, in particular in the United States, relying on adequacy decisions and standard contractual clauses.

Building Out the Ads Platform

OpenAI began with a pilot in the United States earlier this year and has since expanded the offering to eight additional markets. In parallel, the platform has been built out: beyond CPM and CPC bidding, the system now supports conversion optimisation, with geo-targeting and custom audiences added on top. Measurement has been extended beyond clicks through the OpenAI Pixel, a Conversions API and third-party integrations. By the company’s account, tens of thousands of marketers have advertised on ChatGPT so far.

How well the model works from an advertiser’s point of view remains an open question. In the US, ChatGPT advertising has not been a runaway success so far. Competitors such as Perplexity and Anthropic (Claude) run no ads in their chatbots, and Google has so far kept Gemini ad-free as well.