On 5 May 2026, OpenAI opened its self-serve Ads Manager to all US advertisers. No minimum spend. CPC bidding. Pixel tracking. A Conversions API. The infrastructure of a serious performance channel was assembled in under four months from a standing start.
Forty-eight hours later, on 7 May, OpenAI announced the expansion of its ChatGPT ads pilot to five new markets: the UK, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, and Mexico. These countries join the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where the pilot has been running since February 2026.
The speed is worth noticing. Since the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT ads pilot on 9 February, the average monthly ad spend sits around $109 million, according to data from AdClarity. That is a meaningful number for an ads business barely three months old. It is also short of the $2.5 billion revenue target OpenAI has set for 2026, which is why it needs more advertisers, in more markets, quickly.
For UK e-commerce brands and the agencies serving them, this is no longer a story about what might happen in paid media. It is a story about what is happening, and when it will be available to test.
How We Got Here: The Timeline
Feb 2026
Pilot launch: Closed roster of large brand partners in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. CPM-only. Minimum spend $250,000. Categories: shopping, retail, travel.
Early 2026
Pilot expansion: Minimum drops to $50,000. CPC bidding introduced for pilot advertisers. David Dugan, former Meta ads executive, confirmed as Head of Global Ads Solutions.
5 May 2026
US self-serve launch: Ads Manager beta opens to all US advertisers. No minimum spend. CPC bidding available to all. Pixel and Conversions API live. Agency and ad tech partners confirmed.
7 May 2026
Global expansion announced: UK, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, and Mexico added to pilot. Rollout in the coming weeks. Self-serve capability is more advanced in the US than in new markets at launch.
TBC 2026
Next phase: Cost-per-action bidding and third-party measurement confirmed in development. The Trade Desk partnership reported in active discussions.
Why The UK Was Chosen And What That Signals
The five markets in this expansion are not random. “The UK, Japan, and Brazil in particular have relatively high online advertising intensity, representing a more valuable opportunity for OpenAI to capitalise on, in addition to having larger ChatGPT audiences,” said Claire Holubowsky, senior research analyst at Enders Analysis. This is a tried-and-tested expansion playbook: go first to markets where audiences are largest and advertising budgets are easiest to attract.
The UK market is the obvious priority. Online advertising spend per capita in the UK is among the highest in the world. The programmatic infrastructure is mature. Advertiser sophistication is high. At a recent BrightonSEO event, Adthena’s CMO Ashley Fletcher said that every one of approximately 150 execs in the room raised their hand when asked if they want to get ready for ChatGPT ads. Demand is demonstrably there. The question is whether the product, in its current form, can serve it.
The honest answer is: not yet at full scale. In the US, advertisers can reach both logged-in and logged-out users. In the new markets, capabilities are more limited at launch. The UK expansion begins with pilot access rather than the full self-serve stack available in the US. Self-serve will follow — the trajectory is clear — but the UK launch is a controlled expansion, not a full market opening.
Here’s what the numbers say:
- $109M: Average monthly ad spend since pilot launch in February, per AdClarity
- 9: Markets now in the ChatGPT ads pilot, up from 4 before this week
- $2.5B: OpenAI’s ad revenue target for 2026 — the gap between this and the current run rate explains the pace
The Five New Markets
United Kingdom
Highest advertising intensity of the five. Mature programmatic infrastructure. GDPR jurisdiction adds compliance complexity. Strong ChatGPT user base. The most commercially significant of the five new markets.
Japan
Large advertising market. High ChatGPT adoption relative to population. Platform localisation will be required for the ad creative. Culturally distinct search and shopping behaviour from Western markets.
Brazil
Largest market in Latin America. Growing e-commerce sector. CDN infrastructure is less mature than the UK or Japan — latency may affect ad delivery quality at launch. The LGPD data privacy law governs ad targeting.
South Korea
High digital advertising intensity. Strong mobile commerce. Dominated locally by Naver and Kakao for search. ChatGPT ads represent a genuinely different channel rather than a Google alternative.
Mexico
The second-largest market in Latin America. Growing middle class and e-commerce adoption. Lower advertising CPCs relative to the UK and Japan suggest early cost efficiency for advertisers willing to test.
Rules Of The Pilot: What You Need To Know
Who sees ads: Logged-in adult users on Free and Go tiers only. The US can also reach logged-out users. New markets cannot yet.
Who doesn’t see ads: Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education subscribers. All remain ad-free.
Ad categories confirmed: Shopping, retail, travel. Other categories in development.
Labelling: All ads are clearly labelled and visually distinct from ChatGPT responses. Ads do not influence the content of answers.
Sensitive topics: Ads will not appear in conversations involving sensitive or regulated topics. Minors excluded from targeting.
User controls: In-app notification before ads are introduced. Options to hide promotions or manage ad personalisation settings.
Advertiser data access: Anonymised aggregated performance data only — impressions, click-through rates. No access to individual conversations or user transcripts.
Third-party measurement: Confirmed as in development. Not yet live in new markets.
What This Means For UK eCommerce Brands
Three things to hold clearly at the same time:
The intent quality argument is real for the right categories
ChatGPT ads appear in categories like shopping, retail, and travel. A user actively asking ChatGPT for product recommendations or travel options is in a decision-making frame that is at least as valuable as a high-commercial-intent search query. David Dugan, Head of Global Ads Solutions at OpenAI, described the opportunity as reaching "users in a more conversational, intent-driven environment." That framing is defensible. The question is whether the volume of such queries in the UK, at the categories currently available, is large enough to generate meaningful scale for e-commerce advertisers. We don’t yet have that data for the UK market.
GDPR and UK GDPR add a compliance layer that the US pilot doesn't face
The UK pilot operates under UK GDPR, which imposes stricter requirements on ad targeting consent, data retention, and the lawful basis for processing than the US regulatory environment. OpenAI states that advertisers will not get access to personal conversations or user transcripts, and will only receive anonymised performance data such as impressions and click-through rates. That data minimisation approach is designed to manage regulatory exposure. It also limits the targeting sophistication available to UK advertisers relative to what may become possible in less regulated markets. This is a feature for privacy compliance and a constraint for performance marketing — both things are true.
The measurement gap is the most important open question for e-commerce
Third-party measurement is confirmed as in development, but not yet live in new markets. Without it, UK advertisers are relying on OpenAI's own attribution, which creates the same conflict of interest that exists with every walled garden, and which has historically inflated performance metrics at the expense of advertiser trust. For e-commerce brands where every decision lives or dies by ROAS and CPA data, running significant budget through a channel without independent measurement is a genuine risk. The Conversions API and pixel help. They are not a substitute for third-party validation.
The Trust Problem And Why It Matters More Here Than On Google Or Meta
ChatGPT's relationship with its users is categorically different from Google Search or Meta’s social feed. People use it to work through medical decisions, relationship problems, and financial anxieties. The conversations are more intimate than anything Google or Meta has built an advertising business on.
That intimacy is the source of both the opportunity and the risk. Users in a decision-making conversation are high-intent by definition. They are also in a context where an ad that feels intrusive, irrelevant, or manipulative damages trust in a way that a misplaced display ad never could. The important question is whether the habit forms among ChatGPT users before the ads define it.
OpenAI’s stated safeguards — clear labelling, sensitive topic exclusions, and no influence on answers — are designed to manage this. They are also OpenAI’s own public assertions. Independent audits of whether those safeguards hold in practice, at scale, across a global rollout, have not been published. For advertisers placing their brand inside ChatGPT conversations, that is the risk they are accepting in exchange for early access to the channel.
The brand safety question
ChatGPT’s topic exclusions remove ads from sensitive conversations. They do not guarantee that every conversation your ad appears in is one where your brand wants to appear. The ad-matching system uses conversation topics, chat history, and past ad interactions to determine relevance. For ecommerce brands with products in adjacent-to-sensitive categories — health supplements, financial products, relationship-adjacent items — the brand safety controls in place at pilot launch deserve scrutiny before budget is committed.
The People Building The Platform
The hiring signals are worth reading alongside the product announcements. David Dugan, who leads OpenAI's global ads solutions, is a longtime Meta ads executive — someone who built performance advertising at scale on one of the most sophisticated targeting platforms ever created. Industry sources report that The Trade Desk's Samantha Jacobson is joining OpenAI, which the trade press is interpreting as a signal of ad-team scale-up. The Trade Desk partnership itself is reported in active discussions.
The pattern of hires tells you where OpenAI wants to go: not brand awareness, not CPM-only placements, but a full performance stack with CPA bidding, third-party measurement, and programmatic infrastructure. The $100 billion revenue ambition by 2030 requires that stack to exist and work at scale. The UK expansion is one step in building toward it.
What To Do Now
Register interest in OpenAI’s advertiser portal. The UK pilot begins with managed access — getting on the list matters if you want early data. When access opens, test with a defined budget allocation in the shopping or retail category, with clear KPIs set before launch rather than after. The brands that will have the most useful data on ChatGPT ads performance in six months are the ones generating it now, not waiting for the channel to prove itself on someone else's spend.
ChatGPT ads in the UK are not a question of if. They are a question of when and at what scale. The pilot expansion announced on 7 May is a controlled opening of a channel that will, over the next twelve to eighteen months, become a standard line item in any sophisticated e-commerce media plan.
The performance case is not yet proven at the UK scale. The infrastructure is being built in the right direction. The measurement gaps are real and material. The trust question is genuinely open in a way it never was for Google or Meta — not because OpenAI is less careful, but because the context is more intimate and the stakes of getting it wrong are proportionally higher.
Watch it closely. Test it carefully. Don’t wait until everyone else has the data.
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