Yes, you can now advertise inside ChatGPT from India. OpenAI's Ads Manager lists India as available for self-service. Ads appear below ChatGPT's answer, are labelled as ads, and are shown to people on the Free and Go plans. You pay per click or per 1,000 impressions, and the minimum daily budget for a rupee account is ₹725.
Whether you should is a different question. This guide covers both.
Every product fact below comes from OpenAI's own help centre and announcements, checked on 12 November 2026. ChatGPT Ads is in beta and OpenAI says it will keep changing, so confirm the current details at ads.openai.com before you spend.
What are ChatGPT ads?
They are paid placements shown inside ChatGPT conversations. OpenAI began testing them in the United States in February 2026 and has since expanded. In October 2026 OpenAI said ChatGPT Ads were available in 89 countries and that more than 100,000 advertisers had run campaigns.
Three things make them different from the ads you already know:
- They sit below an answer, not in a list of results. One ad unit appears under ChatGPT's response.
- They are matched to a conversation, not a keyword. The system reads what the person is trying to do.
- They do not change the answer. OpenAI states that ads run on separate systems from the chat model and that advertisers cannot shape, rank or alter what ChatGPT says.
Who sees the ads, and where?
| Question | What OpenAI says |
|---|---|
| Which users see ads? | Free and Go plans |
| Who never sees ads? | Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts; accounts identified as under 18 |
| Where do ads appear? | Below a ChatGPT response; a multi-image format is also being tested during image generation |
| How many at a time? | One ad unit |
| Where do ads not appear? | Temporary chats, and near sensitive topics such as personal health, mental health and politics |
| What is not allowed? | Political advertising. Health and financial advertisers must meet stricter eligibility rules |
| What do advertisers learn about users? | Only aggregated figures such as views and clicks. They do not get chats, chat history, memories or personal details |
How does ChatGPT decide which ad to show?
According to OpenAI, the system looks at the context and intent of the current conversation, your ad's title and copy, your landing page, the targeting you chose, and the "context hints" you wrote. If the user has ad personalisation switched on, signals from their wider ChatGPT use can also count. When several ads are eligible, relevance and bids decide which one shows.
Context hints are the new idea. You don't pick keywords. You write short descriptions of what you offer, who it helps and when it is useful. OpenAI's own example: "cushioned everyday running shoes for beginners training for their first 5K" tells the system more than "running shoes". OpenAI is clear that hints are not exact-match keywords and do not guarantee your ad appears for a particular conversation.
What do ChatGPT ads cost in India?
There is no rate card. You choose how you want to pay when you choose the campaign objective:
| Objective | You pay | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Views | Per 1,000 impressions (CPM) | Getting the brand seen |
| Clicks | Per valid click (CPC) | Sending people to your website |
| Conversions | Per click or per 1,000 impressions, optimised towards a conversion event you select. You do not pay per conversion | Enquiries or sales, once conversion tracking is set up |
What OpenAI publishes about budgets:
- Minimum daily budget for a rupee account: ₹725. That is about ₹22,000 a month at the minimum.
- A daily budget is an average. On a single day spend can reach twice the daily amount, and over a Sunday-to-Saturday week it will not exceed seven times the daily amount.
- A campaign-total budget caps spend for the whole campaign and is the stricter control.
- Billing is postpaid. You are charged after ads are delivered.
What nobody can tell you yet is the cost per enquiry. OpenAI says plainly that, as an early platform, it has no performance benchmarks across advertisers or industries. Anyone quoting you a guaranteed cost per lead on ChatGPT is guessing.
How do you start advertising on ChatGPT?
- Create an account at ads.openai.com with a work email.
- Add your brand logo, billing profile and payment method.
- Complete account verification. Ads will not run until this is done.
- Create a campaign: objective, budget, dates, countries. You can also target states, cities and postal codes where available, and choose platforms (Android app, Android web, desktop web, iOS app, iOS web).
- Create ad groups around one product, service or customer need, and write context hints for each.
- Create ads: a title, a description, an image and one landing page. A multi-image format with four to six square images opened as a beta in late October 2026.
- Submit for review. Every ad is reviewed before it can run.
- Watch the numbers: impressions, clicks, click-through rate, average cost per click, spend, and conversions if you set them up. Clicks and impressions update about every 15 minutes; spend can lag by seven to eight hours.
Three practical points from OpenAI's guidance that are easy to miss:
- Your landing page must not block OpenAI's crawlers (OAI-AdsBot and OAI-SearchBot). Check your robots.txt.
- Write several different ads per offering. OpenAI recommends variety so the system can find more conversations where you are relevant.
- New self-service accounts may be limited to advertising in their home country at first. For an Indian business that means India, until the account builds history.
ChatGPT ads vs Google Ads vs Meta Ads
| Google Ads | Meta Ads | ChatGPT Ads | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reaches people who | Type a search | Match a profile while scrolling | Are in a conversation, comparing and deciding |
| You target with | Keywords | Audiences and interests | Context hints, location, platform |
| Ad appears | In search results | In the feed | Below the AI's answer |
| Track record | Long | Long | Months old; no public benchmarks |
| Minimum to start | Low | Low | ₹725 a day |
| Maturity of tools | Full | Full | Beta; OpenAI says features will keep changing |
For the older two, see Google Ads or Meta Ads: which should you start with?
Should your brand advertise on ChatGPT?
This part is our opinion, not OpenAI's.
It is worth a test if:
- your customers research before buying and ask a lot of questions: education, travel, software, finance products that qualify, considered consumer purchases, B2B services;
- your Google or Meta campaigns already bring enquiries at a cost you know, so you have something to compare against;
- you have conversion tracking working, so you can tell whether the clicks turn into business;
- you can set aside a budget you are comfortable treating as a learning cost for four to six weeks.
Wait if:
- you have no tracking yet. Fix that first, on any platform;
- your whole marketing budget is close to the ₹22,000 monthly minimum. Put it where results are proven;
- your customers decide on impulse or by walking past. A Google Business Profile will do more for you;
- you are in a category with extra restrictions and have not checked OpenAI's ad policies.
How we would run a first test: one campaign on the Clicks objective, a daily budget near the minimum, two or three ad groups built around your best-selling offers, four or five distinct ads in each, UTM tags on every landing page link, and a fixed review date. Judge it on cost per genuine enquiry against your Google or Meta figure, not on impressions.
Ads don't buy you a place in the answer
Because ads cannot influence what ChatGPT says, there are now two separate jobs:
- Paid: the labelled ad below the answer. That is what this guide covers.
- Earned: being named in the answer itself. That comes from clear, specific, well-structured information about your business across the web, which is the work of answer engine optimisation (AEO).
A brand that appears in both places, recommended in the answer and present in the ad below it, is in a strong position. An ad under an answer that recommends three competitors has a harder job. Our services page explains how we approach AEO.
Where to go from here
If you want a second opinion on whether a ChatGPT Ads test makes sense next to your current campaigns, book a Free Growth Check-Up. If you are still deciding on your overall channel mix, the free Growth Engine planner is the quicker start, and our performance marketing page explains how we run paid campaigns.
Raj Vidhyadharan is the founder of DMarketing Cryptex, a digital marketing agency in Mumbai, founded in 2019. Sources: OpenAI Help Center (Ads in ChatGPT; Ads Manager availability; Creating campaigns, ad groups and ads for ChatGPT Ads; Ads FAQ) and OpenAI's announcement of 21 October 2026.