Who can advertise on ChatGPT in 2026: countries, tiers, and the checks before the first dollar

Verified on September 2, 2026. The list below changes every few weeks, and the date matters more than the list.

Since August 31, 2026 the OpenAI Ads Manager accepts advertisers from 52 countries. On September 4 the self-serve account opens for the European Economic Area, Switzerland and India. Ads have been serving to users in Europe since August 24. This is the third wave of the rollout: the US pilot started on February 9 with a 200,000 dollar minimum, the self-serve manager opened on May 5 with no minimum, and the summer added the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, Brazil and Mexico.

I spent 2 days inside the documentation, the OpenAI webinar for marketers and the reports of early advertisers. Here is what decides whether you can advertise at all, before anyone talks about bids.

The country of your entity decides

Eligibility follows the country where the advertiser's business is legally registered. The person who manages the account can sit anywhere. A Russian founder with an Estonian OÜ qualifies. A Russian LLC does not, whoever runs it.

Open, 52 countries as of September 2, 2026

Absent from the list on the same date: Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Georgia, Serbia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Singapore. The UAE surprises people most, because half of the relocated founders I know keep a Dubai company. An AI answer may tell you otherwise, the OpenAI availability page does not.

Three things are fixed at account creation and cannot be changed later: the country, the billing currency and the time zone. Pick them for the entity that will pay, and pick once.

Verification runs through Persona and covers the business, the website, the industry, the identity of the person and whether the site matches what the account claims. Health, finance and legal services go through manual review. Alcohol, tobacco, dating, gambling and political ads are prohibited.

Who sees the ads

Only users on the Free plan and on Go, 18 and older, logged in or not. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts never see ads. This decides the channel for you before any test.

If you sell beauty, home goods, electronics or apparel with an average order above 80 euros, your buyer is on the Free plan and the audience is there. If you sell B2B software to marketing directors, most of them sit on Plus or on a company plan, and the reachable audience is the wrong seniority. For B2B I treat ChatGPT Ads as a qualification test of 5 to 15 thousand dollars, and I read it through brand lift, because last-click ROAS on that audience says little.

In Europe there is one more layer. By default ads are contextual: the topic of the current conversation, approximate city, device, time of day, language. Personalization across conversations, the kind OpenAI showed in its webinar where a Tahoe trip conversation surfaces the minivan you looked at last week, requires explicit opt-in under GDPR. Expect lower relevance in Europe than in the US for the first months.

What the account looks like

One format, called chat_card: a title of 3 to 50 characters, body up to 100, a square image up to 1200 pixels, a favicon and a URL. The card sits under the assistant's answer, clearly labeled, and does not change the answer.

There are no keywords. At the ad group level you write context hints, plain-language descriptions of the situations and questions where your product makes sense. No volume estimates, and user prompts are never shown to advertisers. Geo targeting works by country, and in the US down to state, DMA and ZIP. Custom audiences from email or phone lists start at 25,000 matched users. Bidding is CPM with a 60 dollar default, CPC with a recommended 3 to 5 dollars, or oCPC toward one standard conversion event.

Measurement runs through the OpenAI pixel and the Conversions API. Early advertisers report the same first problem: the dashboard shows 120 clicks, GA4 sees 8 sessions, the rest lands as direct traffic. The fix is boring and has to happen before launch: UTM parameters on every ad group, the pixel installed before the first dollar, and a holdout group that never sees the ad.

The check that fails silently

Your landing page must let two OpenAI crawlers in: OAI-AdsBot, which validates the page against ad policies, and OAI-SearchBot, which powers organic citations. Bot protection at the CDN or WAF level, DDoS-Guard, Cloudflare in strict mode, any firewall with a default bot list, returns a challenge page or a 403 to these crawlers. Moderation then fails, and no error message tells you why. The ad simply never runs.

It takes 5 seconds to check:

curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" -A "OAI-SearchBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/searchbot" https://your-site.com

Anything other than 200 is a problem. I have seen this on the first site I checked for a client this week, a large furniture retailer behind DDoS-Guard. It is the first line of my readiness check because the other 5 lines are useless without it.

What early numbers look like

OpenAI publishes no benchmarks. Third-party data from the summer of 2026, treat as ranges:

The low CTR is expected. The card appears after the answer, when the person already has what they came for. The click is a suggestion, and the people who take it convert better than search traffic: Criteo measured LLM referrals converting at 1.5 times other channels across 500 US retailers.

A first signal costs 1 to 3 thousand dollars. A decision you can defend costs 5 to 15 thousand over 2 to 4 weeks. Under 2 thousand there is nothing to count.

If your entity is not on the list

The ad account is closed, the organic side is open. ChatGPT and Perplexity cite websites in their answers, and the country of registration plays no role there. Whether your brand appears when someone asks "where to buy a sofa in Berlin" depends on the same bot access, on structured data, and on pages that answer buyer questions directly. That is a separate piece of work, and for companies in Russia, the UAE or Turkey it is the only door for now.

FAQ

Can a company from Russia or Kazakhstan advertise on ChatGPT? No, as of September 2, 2026. Neither country is on the list. A company registered in Estonia, Germany, Spain, Poland or the US qualifies.

Is Cyprus eligible? Yes. Cyprus is an EU member and is part of the 31 European markets that opened on August 31.

Is the UAE eligible? No, as of September 2, 2026. The UAE, Saudi Arabia and Israel are absent from the list.

Can an agency manage the account from another country? Yes. Eligibility follows the advertiser's entity, and the person who sets up the account can be anywhere.

Which ChatGPT users see ads? Free and Go users, 18 and older. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu users do not.

What is the minimum budget? There is no platform minimum since May 5, 2026. A meaningful test needs 1 to 3 thousand dollars to reach a signal and 5 to 15 thousand for a decision.

Sources

OpenAI, "New ways to buy ChatGPT ads" (May 2026). OpenAI, "ChatGPT Ads expands across Europe" (August 18, 2026). OpenAI Help Center, "Ads Manager availability". Index Lab, country list (September 2, 2026). Choice OMG field guide (August 2026). WebFX, Ads Manager walkthrough. Lapis, conversion benchmarks. Tru Commerce, advertiser reports. Context Hints, case studies. OpenAI webinar "The decision is the opportunity" (August 2026).