ChatGPT now sells ads under its answers about local businesses
ChatGPT now sells a labeled box under its answers, and local service businesses can buy one. Here is where it appears and who sees it.
Co-Founder, Vyzz
What OpenAI turned on this year
A competitor can now pay to appear under the same ChatGPT answer your customers read. OpenAI started selling ads inside ChatGPT this year, and local services is one of the categories it lets businesses advertise in. Since May 5, 2026 there has been no minimum budget. Any US business can sign up and spend what it can afford.
The rollout came in two steps. OpenAI began testing ads in the US on February 9, 2026 with a small group of large advertisers it handled one by one. On May 5 it opened a beta version of its Ads Manager, the page where a business sets its own budget and builds its own ad. The roughly $50,000 minimum spend went away the same day, and OpenAI added pay-per-click pricing, so a business pays only when someone taps the ad. Search Engine Land covered the expansion the week it landed.
Eligibility is still narrow. OpenAI's ad policy describes a limited set of consumer categories as eligible at this stage, and local services is one of the categories it names. Trade coverage of the home-services industry reported the opening for local service businesses in May and pointed readers back to that same policy page. The policy is written at the level of categories. Health, mental health and political advertising stay restricted.
Run an in-home care agency and that last line matters. Home care and health are close neighbors, and OpenAI restricts health advertising. The eligible list is also described as limited and still growing. Read the current policy against your own services before you plan around any of this.
Where the paid box shows up, and who sees it
The ad is a labeled box carrying a business name and logo, a headline, a short description, an image, and a link. That box appears below the end of a ChatGPT response, marked as sponsored and set apart from the answer above it. Only people on the Free and Go plans see it. Anyone on Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise or Edu never does, and neither do accounts ChatGPT reads as belonging to someone under 18.
Most of the people asking about your category are on a free account. They type a question and decide who to call from the paragraph they get back. The paid box is the last thing on that screen. Whether anyone reads that far down is the open question for a small budget.
OpenAI says its ads run on separate systems from the chat model, and that advertisers have "no ability to shape, rank, or alter" what ChatGPT says. So there are two ways a business can turn up in front of that customer. ChatGPT can name it in the answer for free, based on what the model found and could quote. A business can also buy the box underneath.
Whatever anyone spends, the answer above the box gets written the same way it always was. Hold onto that when a sales pitch about ChatGPT ads lands in your inbox this month. Somebody is going to promise you placement inside the answer, and that product does not exist.
Nobody knows yet whether it pays
OpenAI tells advertisers there are no established benchmarks yet, across any industry or campaign type, and that results depend on what a business is selling and how the campaign is built. The early numbers back up that caution. Advertisers are reporting click-through rates around 0.91%, against a roughly 6.4% benchmark commonly cited for Google Search ads. Out of every 1,000 people who see a ChatGPT ad, about 9 tap it. I did that arithmetic myself, because the percentage on its own told me nothing I could plan around.
A rate that low changes what a test costs you. Nine taps per 1,000 views means a lot of views before a phone rings, and under pay-per-click you are charged for every one of those taps. For an agency working with a marketing budget in the hundreds a month, that math is worth checking every week.
The money going in is real all the same. Within six weeks of the first pilot, OpenAI's ad business was already on pace to bring in $100 million a year, a figure a company spokesperson gave Reuters on March 26, 2026. There were more than 600 advertisers by the May 5 opening. OpenAI's own numbers say fewer than 7% of the ads shown so far were rated low relevance by the people who saw them.
The rollout has moved fast outside the US too. By August 11, 2026 ChatGPT ads had launched in the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea, on top of the original US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand markets. Your category is unlikely to stay quiet for very long.
If you do decide to test it, the targeting is tight. A US campaign can be aimed at a state, at a metro area, or at a list of ZIP codes. An HVAC contractor covering three counties can hold its spend to those ZIP codes and skip the rest.
The five-minute check, and what to do with the answer
This is the check I run before I let anyone talk me into a budget. Do it on your phone before your first client of the day.
- Open ChatGPT on your phone, signed in to an account on the Free plan. A Plus or Pro account will show you no ads at all, so it tells you nothing here.
- Type the exact question a customer would type. Something like "who does overnight elder care near me and what does it cost". Searching your own business name gives you a different answer than a customer gets.
- Read the answer first and write down whether your business is named in it.
- Read everything under the answer. Note whether a labeled sponsored box turned up, and whose name is on it.
- Run the same question again in a week or two and see whether that changes.
If a competitor's ad is already running under that answer, the category is live in your area, and you have a real decision to make about testing a small budget. If nothing turns up, you have some time.
Either way, the answer above the box is the bigger prize, and no budget buys it. Getting named there comes from what ChatGPT can find and quote about you: prices in plain text, a clear list of what you do, your hours, and real answers to the questions customers ask you on the phone. An HVAC contractor whose pricing page says "call for a quote" gives ChatGPT nothing it can repeat back, which is why the shop down the road that publishes a price range keeps turning up in those answers instead.
For an in-home care agency, that usually means writing the services out in the words families use. Overnight care, bathing help, dementia support, hospital-to-home transitions, and an hourly range beside each one. A daughter asking ChatGPT for help with her father does not type the phrase "non-medical personal care services," and a page built around that phrase gives the model nothing to hand her.
Paid placement in ChatGPT may earn its keep in a year. As of late 2026 the cheapest work is still making your own pages answerable, and this ad box is a good reason to go look at what ChatGPT already tells people about you.