ChatGPT Ads Go Live This Week at $60 CPM, and UK Small Businesses Can't Buy In

OpenAI's ads inside ChatGPT are rolling out to US users this week. Beta advertisers have been testing since 21 January with budgets starting at $1 million each, paying roughly $60 per thousand impressions, triple what Meta charges. If you run a small business in the UK, you cannot buy ChatGPT ads at any price. They are US-only, agency-only, and priced for enterprise budgets.

Update (10 February): ChatGPT ads went live on 9 February. The organic answer slot above the ads is free.

That creates an interesting situation: the AI platform millions of UK workers use every day is now monetising attention that British businesses cannot purchase. The only way to appear in ChatGPT conversations is to earn it organically.

What OpenAI Announced

On 16 January, OpenAI published its approach to advertising, confirming that ads would begin appearing inside ChatGPT. Two weeks later, MediaPost reported that beta brands had started testing with minimum commitments of $1 million each.

The key details:

• Pricing: approximately $60 CPM (~£46 per thousand impressions)
• Billing model: impression-based, not cost-per-click
• Targeting: contextual, based on conversation content, not user profiles
• Placement: at the bottom of ChatGPT answers when there is a relevant sponsored product or service
• Availability: Free and Go tier users in the United States only

Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscribers will not see ads. Users under 18 are excluded. Conversations involving sensitive topics like mental health or politics will not show advertising.

The Pricing Reality for UK Businesses

To understand what $60 CPM means in practice, compare it to what UK small businesses actually pay for digital advertising:

Cost per 1,000 impressions: ChatGPT vs established ad platforms

Platform	Typical CPM	Impressions per £1,000
Facebook / Instagram	£5 – £10	100,000 – 200,000
Google Display Network	£3 – £8	125,000 – 333,000
LinkedIn	£20 – £30	33,000 – 50,000
ChatGPT	~£46	~21,700

A typical UK SME spending £1,000 per month on digital advertising gets between 100,000 and 200,000 impressions on Facebook. That same budget buys roughly 21,700 impressions on ChatGPT, assuming they could access the platform at all, which they cannot.

The $1 million minimum beta budget translates to approximately £770,000. That is not a typo. OpenAI is not targeting small advertisers. The company is positioning ChatGPT as premium inventory, comparable to live sports and prestige television.

What Advertisers Actually Get

For that premium price, advertisers get remarkably little data. ChatGPT ad campaigns provide only two metrics: total impressions and total clicks. There is no conversion tracking. No visibility into whether a user made a purchase, signed up for a service, or took any other action after seeing or clicking an ad.

In practical terms, these are awareness buys, not performance marketing. Advertisers cannot measure return on investment with any precision. OpenAI has stated that conversations remain private from advertisers and that ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT provides.

That privacy commitment is important. But for small businesses accustomed to Facebook's granular attribution or Google's conversion tracking, ChatGPT's reporting feels like a step backwards to billboard advertising, except the billboard costs £46 per thousand passers-by.

The Altman U-Turn

The irony of ChatGPT ads is best illustrated by Sam Altman's own words. In a Lex Fridman podcast and a Harvard fireside chat in 2024, OpenAI's CEO was explicit:

"I kind of hate ads as an aesthetic choice. I like that people pay for ChatGPT and know the answers they're getting are not influenced by advertisers."

- Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO

He called ads a "last resort" and described the combination of ads and AI as "uniquely unsettling." Then, in a more recent Stratechery interview, the tone shifted entirely:

"I believe there probably is some cool ad product we can do that is a net win to the user and a sort of positive to our relationship with the user."

- Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, Stratechery interview

What changed between "uniquely unsettling" and "net win to the user"? The economics of running an AI company. OpenAI is reportedly projecting $25 billion in advertising revenue by 2029, part of a broader $125 billion total revenue target. With 800 million users and billions in annual compute costs, subscription revenue alone is not enough.

Netflix once insisted it would never show ads. Then it launched an ad-supported tier. OpenAI promised "plenty of notice" before removing GPT-4o, then gave just two weeks before retiring it on 13 February. The tech industry's promises about user experience tend to have a shelf life. Anthropic is betting hard in the opposite direction: the company spent $8 million on a Super Bowl ad telling 120 million viewers it will never put ads in Claude.

The Hassabis Response

At Davos in January, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis offered his assessment of OpenAI's move. When we covered the trust implications at the time, his comments stood out for their directness:

"It's interesting they've gone for that so early... Maybe they feel they need to make more revenue."

- Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind CEO, Davos 2026

Hassabis also questioned whether advertising and assistant trust are compatible: "You want to have trust in your assistant, so how does that work?" Google, he said, has no plans to put ads in Gemini.

That is a notable statement from the CEO of Google's AI division, a company whose core business is advertising. It suggests that even within Google, there is recognition that the assistant relationship is different from search results, and that advertising may compromise it.

What This Means for UK Businesses

For UK small businesses, the situation is simple: you cannot buy ChatGPT advertising. Even if you could, you almost certainly would not want to at these prices.

The maths is simple. A Kettering plumber spending £500 per month on Facebook ads reaches roughly 50,000 to 100,000 local impressions. The same budget on ChatGPT (if it were available) would deliver approximately 10,800 impressions with no geographic targeting, no conversion tracking, and no way to measure whether a single person called. And it is not just ChatGPT locking out small budgets. Google's local pack is now 22% ads, up from 3%, squeezing organic visibility for the same local businesses that cannot afford premium AI placements either.

But here is the part that matters: ChatGPT is still answering questions about your industry. When someone asks "Who should I hire for web design in Northamptonshire?" or "What's the best plumber near Kettering?", ChatGPT draws on its training data and live information to answer. Your business is either part of that answer or it is not.

Our audit of 100 UK small businesses found that only 3 had any AI discovery files. The average visibility score was 31 out of 100. That means 97% of UK small businesses are invisible to ChatGPT, not because they did not pay for ads, but because they have not told AI systems they exist.

The Organic Alternative

If you cannot buy visibility in ChatGPT, you need to earn it. This is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO): optimising your website so AI systems can find, understand, and recommend your business.

The practical steps are:

1. Implement AI discovery files. An llms.txt file tells AI systems what your business does, who you serve, and what makes you different. It is the equivalent of a robots.txt for AI assistants. 99.7% of UK websites do not have one.
2. Add structured data markup. Schema.org markup (LocalBusiness, Service, FAQ) gives AI systems machine-readable information about your business. This directly influences how ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity represent you in responses.
3. Check your current AI visibility. Use the AI Visibility Checker to see exactly how ChatGPT describes your business right now. If it does not mention you at all, that is your starting point.

The irony is significant: the businesses that invest in organic AI visibility now will benefit from higher user trust than those who eventually pay for ChatGPT ads. When someone asks their AI assistant for a recommendation and your business appears organically, that carries more weight than a sponsored placement the user knows was paid for. Of course, whether your content is organic or paid, executive accountability for AI-generated content still applies. The regulator does not care how the ad was placed.

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