ChatGPT Ads Updates: Every New Feature and What It Means (September 2026)

We ran a live session on ChatGPT Ads for e-commerce in September, and the questions in the chat kept coming back to control: where the ads appear, what they appear next to, and who decides. So this page does two jobs. It logs every ChatGPT Ads update with a date and a source, and it gives each one a straight verdict on whether it changes anything for a UK advertiser. If you are new to the platform, start with our ChatGPT Ads guide for how it works and what it costs, then come back here for what has changed.

What's new in ChatGPT Ads? The short version

These are the nine changes that matter, in the order we would pay attention to them. The verdicts are ours and are written for UK advertisers.

The ChatGPT Ads updates that matter, and whether to get excited

1. UK self-serve with no minimum spend

ChatGPT ads went live in the UK on 6 June 2026, and UK businesses got self-serve access to Ads Manager between roughly 19 and 22 June, with no minimum spend commitment.

This is the update that made everything else relevant. When the US pilot started in February, getting in meant a managed deal with a minimum commitment widely reported at $200,000 to $250,000. That fell to $50,000 in April, and when self-serve opened in the US on 5 May the minimum disappeared. The UK followed in June. There is still a minimum daily budget, which OpenAI sets per currency, but a small business can now run a sensible test for the price of a few days of Google Ads.

The good news: the auction is young. OpenAI says self-serve brought small and medium businesses in as "a material share of the business", but most UK advertisers are still not in there, and early auctions tend to be cheaper than they will ever be again.

The catch: you are buying a particular slice of ChatGPT's audience, because only Free and Go users see ads, and that slice arrives earlier in the buying journey than search traffic does. Our early performance data shows how uneven that can be.

2. Conversion bidding: from paying for views to paying for results

ChatGPT Ads went from impressions only (February) to CPC bidding (May), conversion-optimised CPC (June and July), and on 16 September made conversion-optimised impression billing, known as oCPM, generally available.

At launch you paid around $60 for every thousand impressions and hoped. Now you can tell the system what a conversion is and let it find the people most likely to complete one. OpenAI said on 31 August that CPC and outcome-optimised bidding "now account for the majority of campaigns". In its 16 September email to advertisers, it described oCPM, which optimises for conversions from both clicks and views while billing on impressions, as its recommended model for performance.

Why it matters: this is what turns ChatGPT Ads from a brand experiment into a channel you can hold to a cost per acquisition. It is the same shift that made Meta's ads work for small e-commerce brands.

Where it goes wrong: optimisation only works on good data, and oCPM counts view-through conversions towards what it optimises for (more on that in the next section). If your pixel is patchy, the algorithm will happily optimise towards the wrong people. With few conversions, paying per click keeps you in control of what you spend.

3. Shopping formats: product feeds, product cards and carousels

Product feed campaigns turn your catalogue into ads. Since June they have gained product cards with price and star ratings (late July) and a multi-product carousel (early August).

For e-commerce this is the most important format change so far. A single text-and-image card struggles to sell a product range. A carousel of products with prices and ratings, shown to someone who has just asked ChatGPT which running shoes suit flat feet, is much closer to a shop window. Sensor Tower estimated that carousels made up roughly 23% of US desktop ChatGPT ads in the second half of August, according to PPC Land, so advertisers took to them quickly. Feed campaigns also gained conversion optimisation in August.

The head start: if you already run Google Shopping or Meta catalogue ads, most of the work (the feed) is done. Our Meta catalog ads guide covers the feed hygiene that carries straight across.

The downside: feed quality now decides whether you show up at all, and ChatGPT is less forgiving of vague product titles than a keyword auction, because it is matching products against a detailed question. A lazy feed will not serve.

4. The Shopify app and the HubSpot integration

On 16 September OpenAI made Shopify its first e-commerce partner and HubSpot its first CRM partner, so ChatGPT ads can be built and managed from inside both tools. The Shopify app opened outside the US on 23 September.

The Shopify app is free. According to its App Store listing, it syncs your catalogue automatically, builds ads from it, installs a Shopify server pixel for conversion tracking and reports spend, click-through rate and cost per acquisition without leaving Shopify. The HubSpot integration lets you connect a ChatGPT Ads account, create ads, track performance and follow up leads inside the CRM.

The appeal: for a Shopify store without a media team, this removes nearly all of the setup work. Product feed, pixel and reporting come in one install. For B2B firms on HubSpot, closing the loop from ad click to CRM contact is exactly what a lead-generation channel needs.

The risk: easy setup cuts both ways. A one-click install means a lot of stores will launch with default settings and no conversion checks, and early App Store reviews were mixed. At launch the app supports English only.

5. Measurement: attribution windows, view-through and Event Quality Score

ChatGPT Ads now reports view-through conversions (from 19 August), and since 16 September lets you choose between a 7, 14 or 30-day click window and a 0 or 1-day view window. It also grades your tracking setup from 1 to 10 with an Event Quality Score.

The foundations are now sensible. The OpenAI Pixel and the Conversions API can run side by side with shared event IDs so conversions are not double-counted. Automatic advanced matching hashes customer details from your site's forms in the browser to recover conversions when the click ID is lost. Event Quality Score, found under Tools and then Conversions, tells you how well it is all set up. Anyone who has used Meta's Events Manager will recognise the shape.

Why you should be wary: every one of these changes makes the numbers in Ads Manager bigger, and not all of that growth is real. A 1-day view window credits ChatGPT for sales from people who saw an ad and bought anyway. OpenAI's own help centre says reported totals "may include modeled conversions", and that its figures will differ from your analytics. The windows change reporting, not how credit is assigned. Before you compare ChatGPT against Google or Meta, set the view window to zero. If you use GA4 as your referee, read our piece on how GA4 lumps Google's own campaigns together first, because channel reporting has the same blind spots everywhere.

6. Targeting: audiences, platforms and location exclusions

Targeting has grown from context alone to include customer-list audiences, audience bid adjustments, location exclusions and, from 16 September, separate targeting for five platforms (Android app, Android web, desktop web, iOS app and iOS web).

ChatGPT's core targeting is still context: the conversation decides which ad is relevant, and you guide it with up to 2,000 context hints per ad group rather than keywords. What is new is the layer on top. The most useful piece for most businesses is quiet: since OpenAI's product update at the end of August, exclusion audiences no longer need a minimum size, so you can stop paying to reach people who have already bought from you.

The limit: audiences you target still need 25,000 matched users, according to OpenAI's developer documentation. Most UK small businesses do not have a customer list that size, so for them this is a large-brand feature. There is still no keyword or demographic targeting.

7. AI copy suggestions and text customisation

On 16 September OpenAI added AI-suggested copy and images in Ads Manager, a plugin for creating and analysing campaigns by prompt inside ChatGPT, and an opt-in setting that rewrites your headlines and descriptions to fit each conversation and translates them into the user's language.

The copy and image suggestions are drawn from your landing page and campaign objective, and you approve them before anything goes live. The Ads Manager plugin does the same for campaign management: you describe what you want, it previews the change and asks you to confirm.

Text customisation is different, and it is the one to think hard about. If you switch it on, your approved headline is no longer the headline people see. It is adapted to the conversation by a model and, for users in another language, translated.

Where to be careful: this is where the brand-control questions from our webinar land. For most brands a small wording change is harmless. For regulated sectors, or any brand with claims it has to stand behind, "the ad said something we did not write" is a real problem. OpenAI's announcement also described the creative assistance as rolling out while its advertiser email said it was still being tested, so do not assume your account has it yet.

8. Expansion to Europe, India and Asia

ChatGPT Ads went from the US alone in February to more than 60 countries by 23 September 2026. The biggest single step was 31 European markets, announced on 18 August, live from 24 August, with self-serve from 31 August.

For a UK business selling only in the UK, the expansion matters mainly as a sign the platform is here to stay. For anyone selling into Europe there is a practical catch: the UK is not the EEA. In the EU, ads are chosen using only the current chat topic, general location and device type. Personalised ads were held back, and custom audiences are not available in the EEA or Switzerland. A campaign that works in Manchester, built on a customer-list audience, cannot simply be copied to Munich.

9. Sponsored Agents

Sponsored Agents let a user who clicks an ad start a separate, labelled conversation with an AI agent run on behalf of the business. OpenAI announced them on 16 September 2026, and they are being tested with select US advertisers only.

This is the most interesting update and the least useful one to UK advertisers today. An ad that opens into a conversation with the brand is new: it is closer to a sales assistant than to a search ad. OpenAI's example is a shopper asking whether a dining table fits their room and how to look after the finish.

Why not to get excited yet: you cannot use it, and the important questions are unanswered. OpenAI has not said how Sponsored Agents are priced, what counts as a result, who writes the agent's instructions or what the advertiser learns from the conversation. Until those answers exist, there is nothing to plan around.

What still hasn't changed

For balance, here is what nine months of updates have not fixed. This is also most of what our webinar audience asked about.

• Brand safety is still in OpenAI's hands, not yours. OpenAI will not show ads to under-18s or next to health, mental health or political conversations, and every ad is labelled Sponsored and kept separate from the answer. But we can find no documented way for an advertiser to exclude topics or conversation types, and no third-party verification of the kind DoubleVerify or IAS provide elsewhere.
• There is no keyword or demographic targeting. You describe the context you want through context hints, and the system decides.
• Attribution is still OpenAI marking its own homework. Longer windows, view-through and modelled conversions all raise the numbers in Ads Manager. Keep your own measurement.
• Regulated categories are still gated. OpenAI's ad policies ban gambling, adult content, alcohol, tobacco and political ads, and approve financial services, healthcare and legal advertisers case by case.
• Only part of the audience is available. Ads reach Free and Go users only. Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise users never see them.

ChatGPT Ads timeline: every update since launch

Dates are when a change was announced or first reported. Where sources disagree we have used the earliest well-sourced date. The markets column shows who could use the change on day one.

Which countries can run ChatGPT Ads?

ChatGPT Ads run in more than 60 countries as of 23 September 2026, including the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, India, 31 European markets, parts of the Middle East and North Africa, and seven Southeast Asian markets plus Taiwan. Self-serve access through Ads Manager is available for eligible businesses in most of them. OpenAI keeps the current list of Ads Manager markets in its help centre, and it is worth checking there before you plan a campaign in a new country.

What's coming next for ChatGPT Ads

OpenAI said on 23 September that "over the next few months, we will continue to expand into new markets, build new formats, optimization tools, and measurement solutions." That is the only official roadmap. Beyond it:

• DevDay is on 29 September in San Francisco. It is a developer event and nothing about ads has been trailed, so treat any ads news there as a bonus rather than an expectation.
• CPA bidding and more third-party measurement were promised when US self-serve launched in May. oCPC and oCPM cover most of the first; independent measurement has so far come through partners rather than verification.
• Sponsored Agents outside the US is the obvious next step, but OpenAI has given no date or market.

We will update this page as things ship. The date at the top of the updates box is the last time it was checked.

What we would do this month as a UK advertiser

Where to go from here

If you want to understand the platform from the ground up (costs, formats, early results and how it compares with Google and Meta), our ChatGPT Ads ultimate guide covers all of it. If you missed our session, the ChatGPT Ads for e-commerce webinar replay walks through costs and what we found spending real money.

And if you would rather someone else kept up with all of this, we set up and run ChatGPT Ads campaigns for UK businesses. We will also tell you honestly if the answer for your business is to wait.

Sources

• OpenAI, Reimagining advertising with AI, 16 September 2026
• OpenAI, ChatGPT Ads expands to Southeast Asia and Taiwan, 23 September 2026
• OpenAI, A milestone in expanding access to AI, 31 August 2026
• OpenAI, ChatGPT Ads expands across Europe, 18 August 2026, updated 31 August
• OpenAI Help Center, Conversion measurement and Sponsored Agents
• OpenAI developer docs, Custom audiences and Bidding and budgets
• PPC Land, OpenAI lets advertisers run ChatGPT ads from HubSpot and Shopify, 16 September 2026
• Search Engine Roundtable, ChatGPT Ads Sponsored Agents and August product updates
• Adthena, ChatGPT Ads Manager updates, July 2026
• Search Engine Land, OpenAI opens ChatGPT Ads Manager beta to UK advertisers, June 2026

Related guides

• ChatGPT Ads: the ultimate guide for 2026
• How to get cited in ChatGPT
• What is generative engine optimisation (GEO)?
• What is cross-network in GA4?

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