OpenAI will begin serving ads inside ChatGPT across 31 European countries on Monday, August 24, extending its advertising business to 40 markets six months after the February pilot launched in the United States. The rollout covers Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic and Portugal, among others, per Adweek.
Ads will appear only for users on the Free and Go tiers. Plus, Pro and Enterprise subscribers won’t see them.
Colin Fleming, OpenAI’s enterprise CMO, told a briefing call that ChatGPT now sees one billion weekly active users, with 20 percent showing commercial intent, and that ad revenue has grown more than 25 percent since the start of August. The metric that matters here’s the second one: roughly 200 million people a week arriving at the interface with something to buy. That’s a mid-funnel audience Google spent two decades building around keyword bidding, now available inside a conversational surface Meta and Alphabet don’t own.
Europe’s on-ramp, however, is narrow. Access initially routes through the OpenAI Ads Solutions team plus agency partners Publicis, Omnicom, WPP, Havas, Dentsu and MediaPlus, per Digiday. Self-service through Ads Manager arrives “later this summer,” without a firm date. OpenAI also says advertiser conversations remain private from brands.
The pilot has already moved through Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea before landing in the EU, a sequencing that suggests OpenAI is treating regulated markets as the final, not the first, proving ground. The same broader shift toward AI-driven ad buying is underway at Microsoft, where campaign controls are collapsing into model-managed bidding.
Two ad ecosystems, one direction of travel. The auction hasn’t gotten crowded yet.