Apps & Consumer
OpenAI brings visual ads to ChatGPT's image results
OpenAI will begin showing visual display ads alongside ChatGPT's image-generation results in the U.S. later this month, part of a broader push into advertising.
OpenAI is adding visual display ads to its advertising lineup, so that ads will appear alongside images that users ask ChatGPT to generate. The company is also expanding its ad measurement tools and partnerships, and developing new ways to determine brand suitability.
The new ads will begin appearing later this month, in the U.S. only for now, featuring products and services from an initial test group of advertisers. OpenAI says the ads will be clearly labeled and won’t influence the answers ChatGPT provides.
The move follows the launch of Meta’s Muse, a free agentic AI app that is a growing competitor to leading AI chatbots like ChatGPT. OpenAI introduced ads earlier this year to support its free and low-cost subscription tiers, and expanded them to India in August. The company is now looking to attract advertisers who want to use more visual imagery to tell their stories — and eventually to let them target ChatGPT’s 1.2 billion weekly users, once the ads roll out globally.
Integrating ads could prove disruptive to the user experience, though that may be partly the point: the ads could push more casual users toward paying for a subscription to avoid them. Alongside the display ads, OpenAI said it’s expanding its measurement tools and partner ecosystem, which now includes click-attribution providers such as AppsFlyer, Triple Whale, Adjust, DV Rockerbox, Northbeam, Branch, Singular, Kochava, Airbridge and Tenjin, plus full-funnel measurement partners including Fospha, Measured and INCRMNTAL. OpenAI has also partnered with Haus, Measured and WorkMagic to help advertisers run “geo-based” experiments around their ads.
The company said it’s developing brand-suitability evaluation pilots with DoubleVerify (DV) and Integral Ad Science (IAS), to help advertisers better understand the ChatGPT ads environment. Combined, the moves aim to make ChatGPT a viable ad-supported business for users on its free and low-cost plans.
Why it matters
As OpenAI leans further into advertising to monetize its free tier, the shift toward more visually driven, globally scalable ad formats signals how central ad revenue — not just subscriptions — is becoming to funding ChatGPT’s once 1.2 billion weekly users.