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OpenAI will begin serving ads to people using ChatGPT across 31 European markets on Monday (August 24), including Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Ireland, and the Netherlands.
The timing lands at the six month mark for OpenAI’s ads business. What started as a U.S. pilot in February has already moved through Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea. Europe was always going to be slower. Regulation there (namely the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR) requires explicit consent for personalized targeting unless a company can prove a legitimate interest to do otherwise, which is a hard case to make.
“We’re especially excited to bring ChatGPT Ads to Europe as we hit the six month milestone for our global ads business,” said Dave Dugan, vp of ads at OpenAI, said in a statement. “There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all European audience — and that’s precisely what makes the region so dynamic. Europe is home to some of the world’s most creative and sophisticated advertising markets, where expectations around relevance, quality and trust are rightly high. We look forward to meeting that bar.”
The U.K., its first European market, launched in June through agency reps rather than self-serve tools. The pattern holds again here. From Monday, advertisers in the new markets can buy ads through Publicis, Omnicom, WPP, Havas, Dentsu and MediaPlus. The self-serve buying platform for small businesses is coming, OpenAI said, albeit without specifying an exact date. The U.S. version of that tool launched this spring with a minimum spend of $50,000, which has since been dropped.
“This [ChatGPT ads platform] is [still] very much unproven. This is very new, and they are building at a very fast pace,” said Victor Batista, senior director, paid media at Jellyfish, whose clients are part of the pilot and preferred to remain anonymous. “The ad platform that we are using now is not the platform that was released as a pilot in April at all, it’s actually grown massively.”
The European expansion’s groundwork was laid (June 4) when OpenAI updated privacy terms. It detailed how it will process user data across the region once ads go live later this month in a new European Union privacy policy, posted on August 14.
“People come to ChatGPT with goals. In the attention economy, brands have to be interesting; in the intelligence economy, they have to be useful,” Dugan said in the statement. “ChatGPT Ads is designed to help businesses contribute in a meaningful way when someone is deciding to take action, while maintaining user trust and upholding our principles of answer independence, privacy, and user choice and control.”
The fact that Dugan wasn’t even at the company a year ago says a lot about how quickly OpenAI’s pitch to advertisers has evolved. At Cannes, the ads boss, who joined in March, said the AI-powered chatbot had passed 900 million weekly active users, with roughly 20% of queries showing direct commercial intent and a wider band of upper funnel questions like asking the best time to visit the Alps, that he called predictive of a future purchase. He confirmed advertiser conversations stay private and are never shared with brands. The ads business has also introduced a cost-per-click since it launched, which now accounts for most of the ad spend. Dugan called the product 19 weeks at the time, “like a baby”. Two months on, it has grown into 31 more markets.
That urgency traces back to money. OpenAI is carrying infrastructure costs that far outweigh revenue, and ads are now core to how it lightens that load. The company has told investors it expects $100 billion in revenue within four years — a target that took Meta 17 years to reach. Skeptics call that unrealistic. Everything OpenAI has done since February argues otherwise: a pilot, an ads manager, new markets added roughly monthly, ad tech partners, measurement tools, a shift toward cost-per-click bidding and heavyweight hires from rivals. Whether the target is realistic matters less than the pace its chasing it.
“Europe makes natural sense for OpenAI to tap into in order to expand their ad revenue footprint,” said Shamsul Chowdhury, svp paid media at Zeno Group. “There’s a lot of buying power in Europe and if OpenAI can sway dollars away from Google and Meta, they could make an instant impact, especially if they can focus on the intent-based search behavior. With general rising costs of Google and Meta in EMEA, OpenAI could serve as a viable way to offset those costs and do so cost-effectively. The big watchout will be how AI is policed in EMEA; if OpenAI can overcome the AI Act and GDPR rules of engagement, they may have a solid revenue stream to grow in EMEA.”
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