OpenAI to start showing ads to ChatGPT Free, Go users in India

Ads will appear separately below relevant ChatGPT responses and will not influence answers; advertisers will not get access to users' conversations or personal details

OpenAI’s ChatGPT started showing advertisements to its ChatGPT Go and free users in India from Thursday, the company said. Though these advertisements will not affect responses, users may see an ad below a ChatGPT response “when there is a relevant sponsored product or service”.

 

“They will always be clearly labelled as sponsored and visually separate from ChatGPT’s answer, and not influence the answers ChatGPT provides,” the company said.

 

Apart from the non-paying users of ChatGPT, OpenAI will also show relevant advertisements to Go users, who pay a monthly subscription fee of ₹399 to get higher query, message and image generation limits for every 24 hours.

 

 

For ChatGPT free and Go users, users will be given the option to dismiss the ad shown to them, provide feedback, manage the personalisation of ads shown to them, or clear the data that OpenAI will use to show them relevant ads.

 

Advertisers on ChatGPT will, however, not receive any “access to users’ chats, chat history, memories, or personal details”, the company said.

 

These ads, however, will not be shown to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tier users, as well as users below the age of 18, the company said.

 

“Ads will also not be eligible to appear alongside sensitive or regulated topics, including mental health and politics. The company will continue applying advertising policies designed to reduce scams, misleading claims, and other harmful content,” OpenAI said.

 

Advertisers receive aggregate campaign-performance information, such as impressions and clicks, rather than access to individual conversations.

 

The company’s pivot to showing ads to a select group of users comes as OpenAI prepares to shore up its revenue before going public. The company has filed the draft paperwork for its initial public offering and is slated to be listed by early 2027.

 

In March, when the company closed its latest funding round of $122 billion at a post-money valuation of $852 billion, the company had announced that its pilot programme to show advertisements to users had reached $100 million annual recurring revenue in just six weeks. The company has projected an overall ad revenue of $2.5 billion for 2026, and expects overall revenue from ads to touch $100 billion by 2030.

 

In India, which is the second largest market for OpenAI, companies will have the option of showing their ads to relevant target audiences starting at a ₹725 per day budget.

 

“Our weekly active users have doubled year-on-year, with many of them going beyond simple searches and changing how they make decisions. They ask questions, explore options, and weigh tradeoffs through conversation. With ChatGPT ads, businesses of every size can introduce themselves at relevant, high-context moments when decisions are beginning to take shape,” said Dave Dugan, Vice-President and Head of Global Ads Solutions, OpenAI.