OpenAI has started selling advertising inside ChatGPT, and it is pushing advertisers to get set up before the holiday shopping peak. If you sell products online in Australia, this is a new place your customers can find you, and almost nobody here has tested it yet.
We set up a campaign on the day it appeared. Here is what it actually is, what it costs, and the three defaults that will waste your money if you click through quickly.
What ChatGPT Ads is
Ads appear inside a ChatGPT conversation, marked as an ad, while someone is researching what to buy. A typical placement is a small card with an image, a short headline and two lines of description, shown underneath an answer about products or options.
The important difference from Google is intent. People are not typing keywords. They are describing a situation, such as hosting a family dinner or finding a gift for someone difficult, and ChatGPT is helping them narrow it down. Your ad appears inside that reasoning.
The numbers OpenAI is quoting
These figures come from OpenAI’s own published data, so treat them as a vendor’s numbers rather than independent research.
- Retail and ecommerce conversations now account for more than 1.7 billion prompts on ChatGPT each week.
- Around 43 percent of shopping-related conversations involve comparing and evaluating options, which is the moment a brand can still be swapped in.
- In the United States, product-search activity on ChatGPT rose 52 percent across the 2025 holiday season.
- Over the Cyber Five period in 2025, that activity rose 47 percent on average and 94 percent on Black Friday compared with matched weekdays in the previous month.
The honest read: the shopping behaviour is real and growing, the ad product is new, and nobody has reliable cost-per-sale benchmarks yet. That is the argument for a small test now rather than a large one.
Can Australian businesses buy it?
Yes. Australia is selectable as a target country, along with individual states such as New South Wales and Victoria. Two things to watch.
First, the billing currency follows the region on your OpenAI account, not the country you are targeting. On the account we set up, budgets were denominated in Indian rupees while targeting Australia. Check this before you launch, because it affects your invoices and your bookkeeping.
Second, there is a minimum daily budget. On our account it was roughly the equivalent of 13 Australian dollars a day, so expect a floor of a few hundred dollars a month per campaign.
What the ad looks like, and who writes it
You give it your website address and it drafts the campaign for you. It reads your site, picks out themes, writes the headline and description, and pulls an image. For our own site it generated a headline about SEO, built around two themes it found in our pages.
That is convenient and it is also the catch. The draft is only as good as the page it read. If your site is vague about what you sell and who for, the ad will be vague too. This is the same reason clear service pages matter for search and for AI answers generally.
Three defaults to fix before you spend anything
- The target country may be wrong. Ours defaulted to India while the business is in Sydney. Left alone, the entire budget would have gone to the wrong continent.
- The suggested budget is high. Ours came pre-filled at about 50 Australian dollars a day, which is roughly 1,500 a month for a first test of an unproven channel. Drop it to the minimum until you have data.
- The destination is your home page. The URL is locked to your domain, but you can add a path. Send the click to the page that matches the ad, not the front door.
Who should test this now
Worth a test if you sell products online, have a seasonal peak, and can measure a sale properly. Gift-type products benefit most, because that is exactly the conversation people are having with ChatGPT in November and December.
Be more careful if you sell services. Check first whether ChatGPT already recommends you for free. Ask it the questions your customers would ask, and see who it names. If you are already in the answer, paid placement may buy you something you were getting anyway.
What to do this week
- Ask ChatGPT what someone in your category would ask, and note whether you appear and what it cites.
- Check your conversion tracking actually works before adding a new traffic source.
- If you run an online store, get your product feed and catalogue in order, because the holiday window is short.
- Set the target country, then the budget floor, then the landing page. In that order.
- Give it two weeks before judging it, and compare cost per enquiry against what you already run on Google and Meta.
The bigger point
Whether or not you buy ads, people are now asking an assistant what to buy, and it answers using whatever it can read on your website. Clear pages, real detail about what you do, and proof from customers are what get you named. Ads are a way to appear beside that answer. They are not a substitute for being the answer.
If you want a hand deciding whether this is worth testing for your business, book a free call. We will look at whether ChatGPT already mentions you, and what a sensible first test would cost.
Figures in this article are OpenAI’s published numbers. Setup details are from a campaign we built on 23 October 2026 and may change as the product is in beta.
