Your free AI now has advertisers — what that changes, and what your business should actually be paying for

Earlier this year OpenAI said ChatGPT had passed 900 million weekly users, and that more than 50 million people paid for a consumer subscription. The distance between those two numbers is the whole story of the past few weeks. Advertising arrived in ChatGPT in the United States on 9 February.

Canada, Australia and New Zealand followed in March, and on 11 August it reached the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea. On 24 August it began serving in 31 European markets, which OpenAI calls its largest expansion to date. Jamaica is not in the rollout, and a local user should not be seeing ads today.

That is worth knowing before it arrives rather than after, because the tool a great many businesses here rely on for drafting, summarising and thinking out loud is turning into an advertising business, and the terms are already published. What actually appears, and where The detail matters more than the headline, and OpenAI has documented it plainly. Ads appear on the Free plan and on Go, the low-cost tier.

They do not appear on Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise or Edu accounts, and they do not appear for accounts identified as belonging to someone under 18. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu stay ad-free, andJamaica is not in the rollout. (Branded graphic by PGH Consulting) They sit below the end of a response, labelled as sponsored and visually separated from the answer itself.

You are not going to find a paid placement woven into a paragraph of advice. On what the advertiser learns, OpenAI’s position is specific: conversations are not shared with advertisers, data is not sold to them, and advertisers receive aggregated, non-identifying information such as total views and clicks. What an advertiser never receives is your chats, chat history, memories, name, email, precise location, IP address, or sensitive information such as health or political topics.

What selects the ad is a separate question, and the answer is more expansive. Targeting uses the current chat thread, your general location and your language, and if personalisation is switched on it also draws on past chats, memory and which ads you have clicked or hidden. The restraint there is placement rather than data: ads are not eligible to appear near sensitive or regulated topics, including personal health, mental health and politics.