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Issue 3 · Tuesday, December 1, 2026

ChatGPT Ads, six months in

Issue 1 was inbox rules and issue 2 was AI answers. This week is the newest ad platform, and what the early numbers say before you put budget into it.

What changed

OpenAI began testing ads in ChatGPT in February 2026 and opened a self-serve Ads Manager to all advertisers in May, with a daily minimum of $25. (Search Engine Land) By August 31 self-serve was open in 52 countries. Ads show only to signed-in Free and Go users and logged-out visitors, not to Plus, Pro, Business or Enterprise accounts.

There are no keywords. You describe the conversations you want to appear next to in a free-text box called "context hints", and OpenAI's system decides when that fits.

What the first public results show

From Search Engine Journal's September 8, 2026 roundup of advertisers who shared their numbers (SEJ):

  • An ecommerce brand with a high order value spent $9,620 at an average $4.41 per click and reported a return of 3.3x to 6.8x, depending on how sales were attributed.
  • A B2B advertiser spent about $7,000 CAD at $9.29 per click. When the team identified the companies behind 336 paid clicks, they found 146 organizations, and only 5 matched their ideal customer.
  • One account paid $5.10 per click in the UK and $10.62 in the US for the same campaign.
  • OpenAI itself says it has no benchmarks across advertisers or industries yet. The "$3 to $5" figure you will see quoted is its suggested starting bid, not an average.

What we take from this

The channel can work when the buyer is a broad consumer audience with a clear moment of intent. For B2B services that sell to a short list of companies, the B2B result above is the one to remember: you pay to find people, and most of the people you find are not your buyer.

If you can already name the 300 companies you want to work with, you do not need an auction to find them. You need a clean sending setup, a reason to write to each one, and the patience to follow up.

Do this this week

  1. If you test ChatGPT Ads, decide in advance what a good result is for you: cost per qualified lead, not cost per click.
  2. Put a tracking parameter on every ad URL and check which companies the clicks came from, not only how many.
  3. Write down your 50 best-fit accounts by name. If the list comes easily, outbound to that list is probably a better first test than a new ad channel.

If you want it done for you

Setup Sprint with a sequence, $1,250. We set up separate sending domains and inboxes, SPF, DKIM and DMARC, a warmup plan and caps, write one sequence for your offer in your voice, load the Plaintext Pipeline Tracker with your list, and check in after 30 days to review what happened. You send from your own accounts. See the scope.

No promise of replies or meetings. The list and the offer still do most of the work.

Yan

Plaintext was founded by Yan Moukoury. Reply with a question and we may answer it in a future issue.