ChatGPT ads land in 31 European markets on August 24

OpenAI flips the switch on ChatGPT Ads across 31 European markets on August 24 — Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands and more. It's the largest expansion since the US pilot went live in February, following Canada, Australia, the UK, Japan, Brazil and South Korea.

The catch is targeting. Under GDPR, personalized ads need explicit consent, so launch-day ads run on context only: the current conversation topic, location, device, time of day and language. Past chats and stored memories are off the table — OpenAI refreshed its EU privacy policy on August 14 to square the rollout with consent rules. Ads appear as standalone widgets below the answer, and only for Free and Go users; Plus, Pro and Enterprise stay clean.

Advertisers get in through OpenAI's Ads Solutions team and agency partners first — Publicis, Omnicom, WPP, Havas, Dentsu, MediaPlus — with a self-serve Ads Manager landing later. The pitch to buyers: 900M weekly active users, roughly 20% of queries carrying commercial intent, and cost-per-click pricing. Ad revenue is already up more than 25% since the start of August.

Why it matters: OpenAI is building an ad business on the one surface where users state their purchase intent in plain sentences — and Europe just became its biggest test of doing that without behavioral data.