OpenAI is taking another step towards building a full-fledged advertising platform.
The company has begun testing a new advertising format within ChatGPT that allows multiple advertisers to appear within a single sponsored placement. The move expands the amount of ad inventory available in ChatGPT while giving advertisers more opportunities to reach users during product searches and purchasing conversations.
According to an update sent to advertisers, the test is currently limited to a small subset of ChatGPT ads.
Until now, sponsored placements have typically featured just one advertiser. With the new test, ChatGPT can display multiple relevant advertisers within the same ad unit.
OpenAI says eligible ads will be sold via a second-price auction model, a pricing approach commonly used in digital advertising platforms where the highest bidder wins but pays slightly more than the next highest bid.
The company says the goal is to improve user discovery of products, while increasing opportunities for advertisers to engage with high-intent audiences.
For marketers, the test offers a first look at how OpenAI might evolve its advertising business as competition for AI-driven discovery traffic intensifies.
Ads Manager gains more familiar functionality
In addition to the new advertising format, OpenAI is adding several campaign management features designed to make its platform more similar to the advertising systems already used by marketers.
Advertisers can now convert existing campaigns from lifetime budgets to daily budgets and clone CPM campaigns into CPC campaigns with a single click. Impression-based campaigns now also support custom maximum CPM bids.
The company has added bulk editing tools in Ads Manager and announced that daily budgets will move to an average daily budget model, offering more flexibility for the weekly pace.
Taken together, the updates reduce some of the operational friction that advertisers often encounter when managing campaigns across multiple platforms.
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International expansion continues
OpenAI is also expanding geotargeting options.
Previously, advertisers could target users in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The platform now supports targeting in the UK, Japan, South Korea, Brazil and Mexico.
The expansion gives advertisers access to a broader range of international markets and signals OpenAI’s continued investment in growing its advertising ecosystem beyond English-speaking regions.
What marketers should watch
The new ad format may be the most significant announcement of the update.
Allowing multiple advertisers to compete within a single placement increases inventory without requiring OpenAI to dramatically increase the number of ads shown to users. It also creates a more competitive auction environment that could possibly impact pricing and campaign performance.
The test could also offer clues to OpenAI’s long-term monetization strategy. If multi-advertiser placements perform well, they could become a more important part of the company’s advertising inventory and play a growing role in how brands reach consumers during their AI-assisted search and purchase journeys.
