Advertising on ChatGPT in the UK: what a local business needs to know

Where the ads appear

Ads show below a ChatGPT answer, separate from it and labelled as sponsored. Each one carries the advertiser's name and logo, a headline, a short description, an image and a link to your page.

ChatGPT picks an ad from the conversation it's in, the ad's own text and landing page, and short descriptions you write for each group of ads, which OpenAI calls context hints. A hint like “emergency boiler repair in Leeds, same-day call-outs” tells it more than “plumber”.

OpenAI's own help pages use a plumbing firm as the example: one group of ads for emergency repairs and another for maintenance, because the two need different wording and different landing pages.

Who sees them

People on ChatGPT's Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro and business accounts don't get ads, and neither does anyone ChatGPT identifies as under 18. Ads also stay away from sensitive conversations, such as health, mental health and politics.

OpenAI says advertisers can't shape, rank or change ChatGPT's answers, and don't see anyone's chats. You get totals: views, clicks, spend and conversions.

What it costs

You pick what you're buying:

• Views, paid per 1,000 times the ad is shown.
• Clicks, paid per valid click.
• Conversions, where ChatGPT aims for people likely to take an action you choose, such as sending your form. You still pay per click or per 1,000 views, and not per conversion.

You set a maximum bid for each group of ads. For click campaigns, OpenAI suggests starting at $3 to $5 a click, and the auction weighs your bid against how relevant your ad is.

The daily budget is an average over a week. On one day ChatGPT can spend up to twice it, and over a week, Sunday to Saturday, no more than seven times it. For an account billed in pounds, the minimum daily budget is £15, which works out at up to £105 a week and around £456 over an average month.

The catch for a local trade

ChatGPT campaigns target countries. You can also choose devices and upload lists of past customers, but there's no setting for a town, a postcode or a radius. An electrician in Leicester can't tell ChatGPT to show ads only in Leicester.

Two things help. Put the town in the ad and in your context hints, so ChatGPT matches you to conversations about that town. And send clicks to a page that says where you work, near the top, so people from further away don't ring.

Customer lists don't help a small firm much yet: to target people from a list you upload, ChatGPT needs at least 25,000 of them matched.

For a firm covering a big city or a whole region, that matters less. For a one-van business in a market town, Google's ads, which can target a radius or a list of postcodes, is likely to waste less.

Measuring it

Ads Manager reports views, clicks, spend, click-through rate, average cost per click and conversions, if you've set conversion tracking up. Spend figures can lag by seven or eight hours, so a zero in the morning doesn't mean nothing's been charged.

Add tracking tags to the link in your ad. Then ChatGPT visits show up as their own source in your analytics, and the enquiries they bring can go on their own line in your report.

Is it worth trying?

Our view: as a small test, once your Google profile and Google ads already work. Run it for a month at the minimum budget, count the enquiries like any other ad, and compare what each one cost with the figure from the calculator. If it's above the line, stop.

Being named in ChatGPT's normal answers costs nothing per click, and for many local trades it's the better first job. Our page on AI search covers how that works.