ChatGPT ads reach 89 countries, with 100,000 advertisers in eight months

OpenAI has expanded ChatGPT Ads to 26 more countries, bringing availability to 89 countries. The company says more than 100,000 advertisers have run campaigns on the platform since ads launched a little over eight months ago.

Latin America, Africa and Asia get the next wave

The new markets include 14 more Latin American countries, among them Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru. They follow earlier launches in Mexico and Brazil. OpenAI also names Nigeria, South Africa, Serbia, Ukraine, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Pakistan. The full list of 26 is not spelled out in the announcement beyond these examples.

Advertisers in these countries can buy through technology partners or directly in Ads Manager, OpenAI’s self-service tool. The company says the expansion builds on recent rollouts across Europe and in Southeast Asia and Taiwan.

Ads appear only on the Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro and Enterprise subscriptions stay ad-free. OpenAI says the ads are clearly labeled and separate from ChatGPT’s answers, and that advertising does not influence what the chatbot answers. It also says conversations are kept private from advertisers and that it does not sell customer data.

The company frames ads as a way to fund free and low-cost access. It cites more than 1.2 billion weekly ChatGPT users. Its example is a marathon runner planning race-week meals who sees an ad for a grocery delivery service.

L’Oreal is the only named advertiser

The only customer quoted is L’Oreal. Asmita Dubey, the group’s chief digital and marketing officer, says that testing early with OpenAI lets the company build experiences from “discovery, to evaluation, to agentic commerce”. The announcement names no other advertisers and gives no results such as click rates, sales or spend per campaign.

From one country to 89 in under nine months

The pace is the story here. Trade coverage said in January that ads would start in early February 2026 in the United States, aimed at Free and Go users and sold on a per-impression basis, according to Marketing4eCommerce. The same report said that the early test advertisers had reportedly each committed close to $1 million. That suggests the initial buyers were large brands, and a base of 100,000 advertisers points to a shift toward smaller businesses using self-service. OpenAI does not say how many of the 100,000 buy through Ads Manager and how many through partners, or how many are active today.

The announcement also shows how fast the rollout has accelerated. OpenAI’s own page lists recent posts on Europe (August 18) and Southeast Asia and Taiwan (September 23). Today’s step adds 26 markets in a single announcement, so about 63 countries were covered before it. The company says its next phase includes new formats, objectives, buying options and measurement tools. That implies today’s product is still fairly basic, with limited ways to measure what an ad achieves.

For ChatGPT’s own history, this fits a pattern of adding features around the free tier. Earlier this week we reported on locked chats that hide conversations behind a 4-digit PIN, a privacy feature that sits alongside the ad promises about keeping chats away from advertisers. The ads also arrive on a day when OpenAI’s status page flagged a wide outage across ChatGPT, Codex and the API, a reminder of the load the service carries.

What readers in the new markets can expect

For ChatGPT users in the 26 countries on a Free or Go plan, ads can now appear in the app. Paying for Plus, Pro or Enterprise removes them. For businesses, the practical change is access: a shop in Lagos, Santiago or Karachi can now buy placement in ChatGPT conversations without a global agency deal.

Several points remain unverified. OpenAI’s claim that ads do not influence answers is its own statement, and no independent audit is cited. The announcement gives no pricing, no list of every country, no date when each market goes live, and no information on how ads are treated for minors or under local advertising and data-protection rules. Those are the details that regulators and advertisers in the new markets are likely to ask about first.