Ads reach European ChatGPT users this month — while European advertisers still cannot buy them

OpenAI notified ChatGPT users in the European Economic Area and Switzerland on 15 August 2026 that advertising will start appearing on the Free and Go plans later this month, alongside an update to its European privacy policy describing how ads are selected, measured and controlled. Six months after the format launched in the United States on 9 February, the region OpenAI had skipped is now in scope. The terms are narrower in Europe than elsewhere. OpenAI's own help centre states that personalised ads are not initially available in the EEA or Switzerland: selection there starts contextual, drawing on the topic of the current conversation plus general location and device type, with past chats and memories excluded. Personalisation is to arrive later and only behind an explicit opt-in. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts carry no ads at all, and neither do accounts identified as belonging to under-18s. Ads appear below the end of a response, labelled as sponsored, and OpenAI states they do not influence the answer itself: the ad system runs separately from the chat model and advertisers cannot rank or alter responses. Advertisers receive aggregate performance figures only — views and clicks — and no access to chats, chat history or memories. One asymmetry is visible in OpenAI's own documentation and has gone largely unremarked. The company's Ads Manager availability table, which lists where advertisers can actually buy inventory, names nine countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Not one member state of the European Economic Area appears on it, and neither does Switzerland. European users are therefore about to start seeing ads that European businesses cannot yet place; buyers outside the region can. OpenAI says availability may evolve as testing expands and points advertisers elsewhere to an interest form. For readers of this catalogue the practical point is narrow but real: the free default model in ChatGPT — GPT-5.6 Luna since its price cut — is now also the ad-supported tier in Europe. Ad controls sit in Settings under Ad Controls, where personalisation can be switched off; doing so does not remove advertising, it narrows selection back to the current thread. Deleted ads data is retained for up to 30 days.