ChatGPT started showing ads in February. If you run a practice, the useful question is not whether this is a big deal. It is whether you can actually buy one. For most of you, right now, the answer is no.
I read OpenAI's ad policy and help pages rather than the coverage of them. Here is what they actually say.
What the ads are
Ads appear on the Free and Go tiers only. Anyone paying for Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise or Education does not see them.
The unit is simple. In OpenAI's words: "Ads can appear below the end of a response. Ads are clearly labeled as sponsored and visually separated from ChatGPT's response."
Six components, and that is the whole format: advertiser name, favicon, headline, description, landing page, one image. OpenAI suggests roughly 16 characters on the headline and 32 on the description, and says not to use your logo as the main visual.
If you are a dental practice
You can apply. Dental services is named in OpenAI's policy as a health category where, in the US, it "may allow ads from approved advertisers on a case-by-case basis."
Three conditions come with that.
Approval is manual, one advertiser at a time. OpenAI says ads in healthcare, financial and legal "are being rolled out gradually with approvals being reviewed manually on a case-by-case basis."
You may have to prove you are licensed. The policy says so directly.
Outside the US it is off. "Ads for health services outside the US are generally prohibited."
If you are a veterinary practice
Nobody has told you either way.
I ran a word check on the live policy. "Veterinary", "veterinarian", "pet" and "animal hospital" appear zero times. Not in the allowed categories, not in the restricted list, not in the prohibited list. The health section is written entirely around human care.
Meanwhile "local services" has been an allowed category since launch. So a vet clinic is either an ordinary local service or a restricted healthcare business, and OpenAI's published policy does not say which.
The catch nobody mentions
Even approved advertisers do not get placed everywhere.
OpenAI states that ads "are not eligible to appear near sensitive or regulated topics, including personal health, mental health, or politics." Its placement policy lists "Mental and personal health conversations" among the contexts where ads do not run.
Read that against your business. The conversation you most want to reach is somebody describing a health problem and asking what to do. That is exactly the conversation OpenAI keeps ads out of.
And there is a rule sitting in tension with the dental allowance, in the same document. Under advertiser eligibility: "Advertisers whose primary business model or offerings fall within restricted or prohibited categories (e.g., healthcare, weapons) may be ineligible to advertise on our platform."
A dental practice is by definition a healthcare business. The policy names dental as approvable and warns that healthcare businesses may be ineligible, on the same page.
What it costs to find out
- Minimum daily budget
- $25
- Most billable in one day
- $50
- Most billable in one week
- $175
The daily budget is an average, not a cap. OpenAI says spend "will not exceed twice your selected daily budget" in a day, or seven times it across a Sunday to Saturday week.
You can target a city or a postal code on standard campaigns, which is the one thing about this that genuinely suits a local practice.
The rules are moving under you
In April, the dental trade press told practices that "Advertisers in regulated industries, including healthcare, are excluded for now."
By August, dental services was an approvable category.
OpenAI has revised these ad rules four times in five months. Your eligibility can change between planning a campaign and running it, in either direction.
There is also political attention. In January, Senator Edward Markey wrote to OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Anthropic and xAI saying that advertising on chatbots "could deceive them, play upon their emotional connection with the chatbot, and undermine their privacy." That inquiry is live.
The free part, which is the part that matters
Whether or not you can buy an ad, you can be cited in an answer. That is the organic side, and it costs nothing.
OpenAI publishes exactly three things you control.
- Let the search crawler in. OAI-SearchBot is what surfaces sites in ChatGPT's search. OpenAI says sites opted out of it "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers."
- Check your host and CDN are not blocking it. OpenAI's own wording: allow the crawler "and confirm that the website host or content delivery network allows traffic from OpenAI's published searchbot IP addresses." A perfect robots.txt behind a CDN that returns 403 still fails.
- Watch for it in your analytics. Traffic from ChatGPT arrives tagged utm_source=chatgpt.com. If you are not looking for it, you cannot tell whether any of this matters to you.
One thing worth knowing: GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot are different crawlers doing different jobs. Blocking the training crawler does not block ChatGPT search. If somebody blocked GPTBot for you a while back, that did not take you out of ChatGPT's answers.
Beyond those three, nobody outside OpenAI knows how ChatGPT picks what to cite. OpenAI's only public statement is that it "ranks search results using multiple factors intended to help users find relevant, reliable information. Placement is not guaranteed." It does not publish the factors. Beyond those three, anything anyone tells you about optimising for ChatGPT is informed guesswork, mine included. Treat it that way until OpenAI publishes more.
What to do this week
- Check your robots.txt allows OAI-SearchBot. Five minutes.
- Ask whoever hosts your site to confirm the OpenAI searchbot IPs get a 200 and not a 403.
- Add a filter in your analytics for utm_source=chatgpt.com so you can see the real number instead of guessing.
- If you are dental and curious, apply, budget 30 days at the minimum, and treat it as a dated experiment with an end date.
- If you are veterinary, do not spend anything until OpenAI answers you in writing.
The cheap organic work is available to everyone today. The ads are available to almost none of you. Most of what you will read about this gets that backwards.