Until recently, ChatGPT seemed closer to a tutor or research assistant than an advertising platform. That changed on February 9, 2026, when OpenAI began testing ads in the United States for logged-in adults on the Free and Go plans. According to OpenAI, these ads appear below responses, are clearly labeled as sponsored, and do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education users are excluded from the ad experience. (openai.com)
What makes this development so significant is not just the presence of ads, but their setting: a live conversation. OpenAI says ad selection can be based on the current chat topic and, if a user allows personalization, on past chats and previous ad interactions. At the same time, the company says advertisers do not see private conversations, receive only aggregated performance data, and cannot shape or rank ChatGPT’s responses. Users can also dismiss ads, turn off personalization, and clear ad-related data. This suggests a new model of advertising: less like a noisy banner on a webpage, and more like a context-aware suggestion appearing at the exact moment someone is researching what to buy. (openai.com)
Criteo’s entry makes the story even more important. On March 2, 2026, Criteo announced that it had become the first ad-tech partner in OpenAI’s advertising pilot for ChatGPT Free and Go in the United States. Criteo says it works with 17,000 advertisers globally, activates more than $4 billion in annual media spend, and has observed that traffic from LLM platforms such as ChatGPT converts at about 1.5 times the rate of other referral channels in a sample of 500 U.S. retailers. Meanwhile, OpenAI has been expanding shopping features inside ChatGPT itself: on March 24, 2026, it introduced richer product-discovery tools and broadened the Agentic Commerce Protocol so merchants can supply more up-to-date product data directly to ChatGPT. If search advertising was built for keywords, this new phase may be built for dialogue. (criteo.com)










