AI has a new revenue stream, and it looks a lot like old web banner ads.
What’s new: OpenAI began a test to display advertisements in ChatGPT. Ads appear to U.S. users of OpenAI’s free and least-expensive plans (not to subscribers to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, or Enterprise tiers or users of the API). The company plans to expand the experiment to other regions and test more-conversational ads on an unspecified timeline.
How it works: Ads relevant to a conversation will appear at the bottom of the chat, including a brief message, image, and link. They do not influence chat responses. Ads appear only to adults in the U.S. who are logged in to desktop or mobile versions of the ChatGPT website or app.
- Look and feel: Ads are clearly labeled and separated from chat responses. Users can dismiss ads and provide feedback.
- Privacy: Ads do not appear near chats that discuss health, mental health, or politics. Conversations are not shared with advertisers.
- Controls: Besides conversations, ads are tailored for each user according to their chat history, location, and personal information they share with ChatGPT. Users can turn personalization on and off, reset data used for ad targeting, or clear their chat history entirely.
- Future plans: Ads could eventually appear in different layout formats and for users in different regions and tiers. OpenAI showed a mockup of a display ad at the top of a conversation, rather than the bottom, in the mobile app. The company said future ads might allow users to ask questions about ad content to help make a purchasing decision. OpenAI said it would always offer an ad-free plan but left open the possibility of expanding ads to other paid tiers.
Behind the news: OpenAI is figuring out how to bring in enough revenue to yield profit. The company revealed that it took in $20 billion in revenue and used 1.9 gigawatts of computing power in 2025 at a cost estimated to have exceeded $9 billion. (Both revenue and processing have roughly tripled annually since 2023.) Meanwhile, OpenAI projects capital spending of $115 billion by 2029, The Information reported. Advertising is part of an evolving revenue strategy that includes subscriptions, ecommerce, and metered API access.
- Subscriptions: OpenAI said numbers of weekly and monthly active users of ChatGPT continued to reach all-time highs, but it didn’t specify numbers or how they break down between free and paid plans. In October, CEO Sam Altman said ChatGPT had reached 800 million weekly active users, which includes a reported 35 million Plus or Pro subscribers.
- Localized pricing: Open AI announced a worldwide expansion of ChatGPT Go, the low-cost, limited-capability subscription plan the company tested in India. ChatGPT Go costs $8 per month in the U.S., with lower prices in some countries; for example, ₹399 per month (roughly $4.40) in India.
- Ecommerce: In September, OpenAI introduced agentic shopping that allows logged-in users to buy items from participating merchants including Etsy, Shopify, and Walmart within ChatGPT. It’s unclear whether users will be able to buy advertised products directly during the current tests.
Why it matters: Delivering AI to a fast-growing, worldwide market incurs immense expenses, and business strategies are still evolving. Unlike its Big Tech rivals, OpenAI doesn’t have other businesses to offset these costs (although Google is also experimenting with chatbot ads). The combination of advertising and low-cost ChatGPT subscriptions gives OpenAI a new route to profit. If it works, the company’s premium tiers will no longer completely subsidize the free ones, and premium-tiers users will continue to use ChatGPT ad-free, at least for now.
We’re thinking: OpenAI is dipping its toes into the water with display ads, a tried-and-true advertising format. However, genuinely chatbot-native advertising probably will look and feel significantly different.