OpenAI has started a careful test of advertising in ChatGPT — without abrupt changes and with fairly clear boundaries. This is not a full rollout, but a pilot: ads are shown only to some users in the US, and only in the free version and the low-cost ChatGPT Go plan. Paid tiers — Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise — remain completely ad-free 🙂
The format itself is deliberately restrained. Ads appear at the bottom of a response, only when the conversation topic genuinely matches an advertiser’s offer. They are clearly labeled as ads and are not embedded into the generated text. OpenAI explicitly states that ChatGPT’s answers are not altered or “optimized” for advertising — ads exist at the interface level, not inside the model 🧩
From a technical perspective, this matters. The model continues to operate exactly as before, without commercial content influencing its generation logic. Context is used only to decide whether to show an ad, not to pass conversation data to advertisers. Chat history is not sold, and ad personalization can be disabled in settings. For engineers and developers, this is a telling example of how an AI service can be monetized without interfering with the model itself ⚙️
In practice, for most users nothing really changes yet. This is a limited experiment that affects only the free tier. For the market, however, it’s a clear signal: large AI platforms are looking for sustainable revenue models beyond subscriptions, because infrastructure and compute costs are extremely high. At the same time, OpenAI is setting boundaries in advance — no ads on sensitive topics like healthcare or politics, and no ads shown to minors 🚧
There are still plenty of open questions. It’s unclear how quickly the test might expand to other countries, which ad formats will prove viable, and whether this could affect user trust over time. But the overall approach — cautious, technically isolated, and with a clear separation between ads and AI responses — looks like an attempt not to break what people value ChatGPT for 🤝
