OpenAI says ChatGPT Ads hit a $1 billion run rate in under 200 days

OpenAI says ChatGPT Ads reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate less than 200 days after launch, and that more than 100,000 advertisers have run ads on ChatGPT since then. The company disclosed the figures in an engineering post on how it built the ad system.

OpenAI says ChatGPT needed a new kind of ad stack because user intent develops across turns and conversations rather than arriving as single searches or page views. The system runs on a custom, post-trained frontier model that acts as an orchestrator, calling tools for ad retrieval, ranking, relevance checks and an auction that sets the final selection and price.

Three design choices shape it, according to the post: ad sessions are stateful, so information is remembered across turns and conversations; the post-trained model interprets the conversation's context and intent; and ad selection runs as a separate service alongside answer generation, which OpenAI says keeps ads from influencing ChatGPT's responses. The orchestrator also filters ads for relevance and safety before the auction.

The disclosure follows OpenAI's expansion of ChatGPT Ads to 26 more countries, bringing the ad product to 89 markets.