Model: ChatGPT · Ads Manager Beta
On 19 June 2026, OpenAI told advertisers that its ChatGPT Ads Manager Beta is now available in the United Kingdom — a self-serve home at ads.openai.com for creating, managing and reporting on ads that run inside ChatGPT. The placements arrived a fortnight ago; now the desk to buy them is open.
What OpenAI just announced
OpenAI has begun inviting UK advertisers into the Ads Manager Beta, the central console for running campaigns in ChatGPT. According to the rollout, it gives advertisers a single place to:
- Create, edit and manage campaigns targeting ChatGPT users.
- Track campaign performance and download reporting on how those placements do.
- Add teammates and manage account access and permissions across a team.
Onboarding runs through ads.openai.com and OpenAI’s Help Center resources. In plain terms: the experimental ad surface inside ChatGPT now has a proper, self-serve buying tool sitting behind it — the same shape of console advertisers already know from search and social platforms.
What it looks like inside Ads Manager Beta
To see how it works, we built a test campaign for reconnAI inside the new console. The flow will look familiar to anyone who has used a search or social ads platform — a campaign, an ad group with bidding and targeting hints, an ad creative, and a review before launch.
From “ads are coming” to “you can buy them”
This is the second half of a story we covered earlier this month. On 4 June, OpenAI started showing ads inside ChatGPT to Free and Go plan users in the UK — the demand side, where real people began seeing sponsored placements in their answers. The Ads Manager Beta is the supply side: the controls that let brands actually plan, fund and measure those placements.
When both halves are live, an ad surface stops being an experiment and starts being a channel. That is the line ChatGPT in the UK has just crossed.
Two ways a brand can show up in ChatGPT
What a self-serve ad desk changes
For two years, being visible in ChatGPT has been almost entirely earned — brands surfaced because the model judged their content, citations and reputation worth naming. A self-serve buying tool adds a parallel route to the top of the answer that does not depend on that judgement at all. Once any advertiser in your category can open ads.openai.com and fund a placement, the competition for attention inside an answer is no longer only about merit; it is also about who shows up to buy.
Reporting matters here too. Because Ads Manager Beta ships with performance tracking and downloadable reports, advertisers will quickly learn which queries and categories convert — and lean into them. The categories where sponsored placements cluster first are exactly the ones where earned visibility gets harder to hold.
What this means for brands
If your buyers ask ChatGPT about your category, this is the moment to look at both lanes at once. Are you still being named on merit in the answers that matter? Are competitors likely to buy sponsored placements against those same questions? And if a paid result now sits above or beside your earned mention, how much of the attention does it take? You cannot manage what you cannot see — and a sponsored placement that appears for some users and not others is easy to miss entirely.
The practical move is to baseline how you appear in ChatGPT now, while the UK ad market is still forming, so you can tell the difference between a decline in earned visibility and a rival simply outspending you. The brands that watch both lanes will make far better decisions about where to invest than the ones tracking only one.
What we’re watching
The signals worth following over the coming weeks: which sectors see sponsored placements first, how often a paid result appears alongside or above earned brand mentions, whether the presence of ads changes the set of organic brands ChatGPT names, and how visible the “sponsored” labelling is to everyday UK users. Each of those shapes how much room is left for earned visibility in a given category.
How reconnAI tracks changes like this
reconnAI monitors how the leading AI assistants — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overview — answer questions across regions, and tracks both the organic brand mentions and the sponsored placements that show up inside those answers. If you want to see how your brand appears in ChatGPT now that UK advertisers can buy placements directly, you can get in touch with our team or explore how AI visibility tracking works.
ChatGPT Ads
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Whether you are planning to buy placements or protect the earned visibility you already have, we will help you see how your brand shows up in ChatGPT — and build a plan around it.
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reconnAI tracks how the major AI models represent topics and sources across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overview — across multiple regions. We monitor how those models answer and how they change over time, so you can stay ahead of shifts in the AI landscape.