ChatGPT Ads keep growing — a wider ad card, multi-image ads and 89 countries

ChatGPT Ads are available in 89 countries. At the end of October OpenAI added a wider ad card on desktop and opened the multi-image format to every advertiser as a beta. So next to the assistant’s answer, the one we compete for with content, a paid layer keeps growing. Here is what was actually announced, what is still unknown, and what it means for anyone responsible for how a brand shows up in search.

What OpenAI announced in October

The changes came in two steps, and they are easy to mix up.

On October 21 OpenAI published a post about expanding ChatGPT Ads to 26 more countries, 89 markets in total. It also said that since ads launched just over eight months ago, more than 100,000 advertisers have run campaigns. The first ads went live in the US on February 9, 2026. PPC Land points out that the figure is cumulative: it counts everyone who ever ran a single campaign, so it says nothing about how many advertisers are active now or how much they spend.

The post names only 11 of the 26 new countries: Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru (out of 14 new Latin American markets), plus Nigeria, South Africa, Serbia, Ukraine, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Pakistan. The other 15 are not listed. Ads there are bought through technology partners or self-serve in Ads Manager.

On October 30 advertisers received OpenAI’s weekly email, covered by Search Engine Roundtable. According to it:

• a new, wider standard ad card is rolling out that uses more of the conversation width on desktop; it runs on existing campaigns and creative, so advertisers don’t need to change anything;
• multi-image ads are in open beta for all advertisers;
• the Shopify integration is now available internationally.

The email also repeats older news, including the 26-country expansion. The genuinely new parts are the card and the multi-image format.

What the multi-image format looks like

The details come from OpenAI’s help pages for advertisers, summarised by Relevant Audience. Since October 26, when you create an ad in Ads Manager, you choose a single image or multiple images. A multi-image ad has 4 to 6 square (1:1) images. Each one is clickable, but they all lead to the same URL, and for now the only button is “Learn more”. The format works in campaigns with a Reach, Clicks or Conversions objective.

One shared URL for every image decides a lot. The format suits a single collection or product category, not four different promotions. And with “Learn more” as the only button, the landing page has to do all of the selling.

Automatic creative changes

From October 30 OpenAI turns on so-called creative enhancements by default in all new and existing campaigns where the advertiser has not opted out. According to the help page, the system can rewrite headlines and descriptions to fit the conversation, translate the ad, resize images and even send the click to a different page on your site. Variations are prepared in advance or created in real time during the conversation, and they can run without each one being approved. There is no preview of every version.

You turn the feature off in account or campaign settings, and a campaign setting takes priority over the account default. Turning it off only stops future variations; it cannot recall the ones that have already run.

That matters for analytics: if the system can swap the landing page, you need to know what happens to your UTM tags. OpenAI’s help pages tell advertisers to add tracking parameters to each ad’s destination URL, and Ads Manager also supports parameters set at campaign, ad group and ad level (with macros such as {campaign_id} or {ad_id}). What they don’t explain is whether UTM tags from the original URL carry over to the swapped page. It is also unclear whether the automatic changes apply to multi-image ads.

ChatGPT Ads in Europe

Europe came in one wave. OpenAI announced it on August 18, and according to PPC Land ads started showing in 31 European countries on August 24, Poland among them. They are shown to users of the Free and Go plans, while Plus, Pro and Enterprise stay ad-free. OpenAI says ads are clearly labelled and kept separate from answers, do not influence what ChatGPT replies, and that conversations are not shared with advertisers. Spider’s Web adds that users can switch ad personalisation off. These are all the company’s own claims; nobody has verified them independently yet.

What this means for SEO

The changes also affect people who work on organic visibility, in three places.

1. The answer screen looks different. Next to the answer and the cited sources there is now a paid card, wider on desktop. OpenAI itself says it targets the moment when someone compares options and picks a product. That is exactly where an organic brand mention competes for attention with an ad. How many clicks this takes away can’t be judged today: the October 21 announcement contains no figures on spend, prices or results. I collected the data on how AI answers themselves affect organic traffic in Do AI answers kill traffic?.

2. The landing page has to let OpenAI’s bots in. According to the advertiser help pages, it must not block the OAI-AdsBot and OAI-SearchBot user agents. If robots.txt or your WAF rules cut off all bot traffic, ads may not work, and on top of that the site drops out of ChatGPT search, which OAI-SearchBot is responsible for. I explained how to tell AI search bots from training crawlers in AI crawlers vs search crawlers.

3. “Traffic from ChatGPT” has to be split into two sources. Clicks from ads and clicks from citations in answers are very different things, and a report can easily lump them together. The simplest fix is to tag only the ads with consistent UTM parameters and check that those parameters actually reach the page. OpenAI’s help pages explain how to check this on an iPhone: ChatGPT’s in-app browser shows only the hostname, so copy the full link with Share. How to set up AI traffic reporting in GA4 is covered in new SEO KPIs. I cover measuring traffic from language models, and visibility in them, in more detail in how to make your website visible to LLMs.

What we still don’t know

• Which 15 of the 26 new countries OpenAI did not name.
• When the wider card will reach every account, and whether anything changes on mobile. The email gives no date.
• Whether automatic creative changes apply to multi-image ads, and what happens to UTM parameters when the system changes the destination URL.
• How ads affect clicks on the sources cited in answers. No such data has been published.

Summary

In less than nine months ChatGPT Ads went from a US launch to 89 countries, more than 100,000 advertisers (counting everyone who ever started a campaign), new formats and creative automation switched on by default. For SEO that leaves three practical points: there is now a paid card next to the AI answer, landing pages must let OAI-AdsBot and OAI-SearchBot in, and analytics should separate ad traffic from citation traffic. There is no data on ad performance yet, so I would wait for the first reliable measurements before judging the impact on organic visibility.

Sources

1. OpenAI: ChatGPT Ads expands to 26 new countries as over 100,000 advertisers have used the platform https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-ads-expands-26-new-countries/
2. Search Engine Roundtable: ChatGPT Gets Wider Ads, Multi-Image Ads Expands, Expansion & More https://www.seroundtable.com/chatgpt-ads-update-42427.html
3. PPC Land: Advertisers in 26 more countries gain ChatGPT ads, bringing the total to 89 https://ppc.land/advertisers-in-26-more-countries-gain-chatgpt-ads-bringing-the-total-to-89/
4. Relevant Audience: ChatGPT Ads creative enhancements are now on by default, and multi-image ads are open to all https://www.relevantaudience.com/ai/chatgpt-ads-creative-enhancements-live-multi-image-ads/
5. Spider's Web: Nowość w ChatGPT, której nikt nie pokocha. W Polsce także https://spidersweb.pl/2026/08/chatgpt-reklamy-polska.html