OpenAI has confirmed that advertising is officially coming to ChatGPT, closing the door on months of speculation about whether the platform would remain entirely subscription funded. The confirmation comes directly from OpenAI’s newly published advertising policy, which outlines how ads will be introduced, who will see them, and what limits the company says it will enforce.
The policy states that OpenAI plans to begin testing ads in the United States for logged-in adult users on the free tier and the ChatGPT Go tier. Paid plans above Go, including Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise, will remain ad free. For users who want a guarantee that ads never appear inside ChatGPT, paying for a higher tier will be the only way to ensure that.
This is a meaningful shift for a product that many people now use as a daily thinking and decision-making tool. ChatGPT is not a feed, a timeline, or a search engine results page. People rely on it to draft documents, plan trips, learn new skills, solve technical problems, and reason through complex questions. Introducing advertising into that environment changes the relationship between the platform and its users in a way that goes beyond traditional ad-supported services.
OpenAI’s advertising policy, published on its website, frames ads as a way to expand access to powerful AI without raising prices or removing free usage entirely. The company says the goal is to keep ChatGPT widely accessible while supporting the growing costs of operating large-scale AI systems.
According to the policy, ads will be clearly labeled and visually separated from AI-generated answers. OpenAI says ads will not influence the responses ChatGPT provides and that answers are optimized based on what is most helpful to the user, not what benefits advertisers. Conversations are kept private from advertisers, and OpenAI states that it does not sell conversation data for advertising purposes.
Users will be able to dismiss ads, see why a particular ad was shown, and turn off personalization. Ads will not be shown to users under 18, and OpenAI says they will not appear near sensitive or regulated topics such as health, mental health, or politics. Initial testing is expected to place ads at the bottom of answers when OpenAI determines there is a relevant sponsored product or service connected to the conversation.
While this is the first time OpenAI has publicly laid out its advertising plans, the idea did not emerge suddenly. In December 2025, we became aware of a leak inside the ChatGPT Android application that revealed OpenAI was already building a full advertising framework into the product. That investigation, published on Botcrawl in early December, showed that version 1.2025.329 of the ChatGPT app contained structured ad metadata, ranking logic, impression tracking, dismissal events, and contextual relevance signals consistent with a production-ready ad system.
The terminology found in the app resources pointed to features such as ad ranking weights, contextual scoring, carousel-style placements, and viewability tracking. At the time, OpenAI did not publicly comment on those findings. The newly published advertising policy now effectively confirms that the infrastructure identified in December was part of a planned rollout rather than an abandoned experiment.
Alongside the advertising policy, OpenAI also announced the broader availability of ChatGPT Go, a lower-cost subscription priced at eight dollars per month. According to OpenAI, Go is designed to give users expanded access to its latest model, GPT-5.2 Instant, with higher usage limits than the free tier. The plan includes more messages, more file uploads, more image generation, and longer memory, while still remaining below the price of ChatGPT Plus.
Advertising plays a central role in making that pricing possible. OpenAI presents ads as the mechanism that allows it to offer a low-cost tier and keep the free version available, rather than forcing all users into higher-priced subscriptions. This mirrors the path taken by many large platforms once they reached massive scale, but the context here is different.
Advertising has traditionally lived alongside content consumption. Video platforms show ads before or during playback. Search engines display sponsored results next to links. Social networks mix promotions into feeds. ChatGPT operates in a more intimate space. It responds directly to user intent, follows multi-step reasoning, and adapts to the flow of a conversation. Even if ads are clearly labeled and technically separate, they appear inside the same interface users rely on for guidance.
This proximity to intent is what makes ChatGPT valuable, and it is also what makes advertising inside it more sensitive. When a system understands not just what someone typed, but why they are asking, the line between assistance and promotion becomes easier to question. OpenAI’s policy repeatedly emphasizes answer independence and user trust, likely because the company understands how fragile that trust can be once ads enter the picture.
From a business perspective, the move is not surprising. ChatGPT operates at enormous scale, with hundreds of millions of users and a volume of daily prompts that carries significant infrastructure costs. Subscriptions alone do not monetize the entire user base, particularly when the free tier accounts for a large share of usage. Advertising offers a way to support that scale without eliminating free access.
For users, the choice is straightforward but consequential. Free and Go users will eventually see ads. Higher tiers will not. Whether that tradeoff feels acceptable will depend on how ads are presented, how relevant they are, and whether OpenAI’s stated boundaries hold up in practice.
Ads are not live yet, and OpenAI says testing will roll out gradually, starting with logged-in adult users in the United States. The company says it will refine formats based on feedback. What cannot be refined away is the underlying change. ChatGPT is no longer just a subscription product or a research tool. It is becoming, at least in part, an ad-supported platform.
If advertising inside conversational AI proves effective, it is unlikely to stop with OpenAI. Other platforms will watch closely. A new category of advertising built around conversational context rather than static placement may emerge. For now, the most important point is simple. OpenAI has confirmed its direction, and ads are coming to ChatGPT.
