Advertising inside ChatGPT has gone from experiment to major business line in remarkably short order. OpenAI now says its ad product has reached a $1 billion annualised revenue run rate in under 200 days, a milestone that places ChatGPT among the fastest-growing ad platforms in tech history. The company is marking the moment by opening self-service advertising to a new set of markets, even as European regulators simultaneously tighten their grip on the platform.
ChatGPT’s ad business began with a managed-sales model, relying on agencies and technology partners to bring advertisers onto the platform. That approach has since scaled dramatically: the product is now available in more than 40 countries, supported by an ecosystem of over 50 technology and measurement partners. Tens of thousands of advertisers reportedly now run campaigns through the system.
A turning point came with the introduction of Ads Manager, a self-service tool that let small and medium-sized businesses buy ads directly without negotiating a managed contract. OpenAI says SMBs already account for a meaningful share of total ad revenue, and that advertisers outside the United States are contributing a growing portion of that total, with some of the largest clients running simultaneous campaigns across multiple countries.
The next step in that expansion lands now: self-service access through Ads Manager is opening today in India, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Businesses in those regions, which previously could only advertise on ChatGPT through managed or partner channels, can now set up an account and launch a campaign directly.
How the Ads Actually Work
The underlying mechanism is built around conversational context. OpenAI’s system reads what a user is currently discussing with ChatGPT and selects an ad relevant to that topic in the moment, the idea being that people often arrive at ChatGPT already partway through a decision, whether comparing purchases, planning a renovation, or researching a career move. Depending on the country and the user’s settings, targeting can also draw on a person’s broader ChatGPT usage and interests, not just the live conversation.
OpenAI maintains that ads are clearly labeled and kept visually separate from ChatGPT’s actual responses, and insists that advertising has no influence over what the assistant tells users. Advertisers are not given access to private conversations, and users can control how personalization is applied. On the measurement side, the platform now supports cost-per-click and outcome-optimized bidding, pixel and Conversions API integrations for tracking results, and tools like product feeds and custom audience targeting that mirror mature ad platforms elsewhere in the industry.
The EU Steps Up Oversight
The timing of this expansion is notable, because it coincides with heightened regulatory scrutiny in one of the very regions now gaining self-service access. The European Commission has designated ChatGPT a Very Large Online Search Engine under the Digital Services Act, a status triggered once a service is shown to reach at least 45 million average monthly users in the EU. Reddit and Roblox received the equivalent large-platform designation at the same time.
The designation matters because it classifies ChatGPT as a hybrid service, an AI system that also functions as a search engine by fetching information from the web in response to prompts. That classification brings a new layer of obligations on top of the general rules that already applied to it, including requirements to assess and mitigate systemic risks tied to illegal content, harm to minors, users’ mental and physical wellbeing, protection of legal rights, and threats to elections and public security. OpenAI has four months from notification to comply, putting the deadline in January 2027. Oversight will be shared between the European Commission and Ireland’s Digital Services Coordinator, reflecting where OpenAI’s EU operations are legally based.
A senior Commission official framed the designations as putting these platforms under sharper scrutiny given their reach and influence in the EU, while noting the Commission will continue applying the same threshold to other qualifying services going forward. The bloc has now designated 28 very large platforms and search engines under the DSA in total.
What Comes Next
OpenAI says its internal measures of user trust and ad relevance have held steady through the rollout, though it hasn’t published supporting figures. It points to early advertiser results — including a claimed threefold return on ad spend for one ecommerce client and a majority-new-customer rate for another partner, as evidence the format is working. Looking ahead, the company plans further geographic expansion, new ad formats and bidding options, and unspecified "more native" ways for businesses to interact with users inside conversations.
Whether that growth continues at its current pace may depend as much on Brussels as on Silicon Valley. As ChatGPT’s ad business pushes into new markets, the EU’s compliance clock is now running in parallel, a reminder that scaling an ad platform inside a conversational AI product invites a different order of regulatory attention than a conventional ad network.
Written by:
*Chloe Maluleke
Associate at BRICS+ Consulting Group
Russia & Middle East Specialist
**The Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of Independent Media or IOL.
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