Since 31 August 2026, any company based in Europe can create an advertising campaign inside ChatGPT. OpenAI’s Ads Manager has moved to self-service in France and in around 30 European markets, one week after being opened only to partner agencies. The setup will feel familiar to advertisers: campaigns, ad groups and ads, with the usual performance-oriented objectives.
The move marks a new phase for ChatGPT as an acquisition channel. Before OpenAI started selling advertising inventory, the product was already generating customers for businesses that learned how to use it as a discovery and conversion tool. In other words, ChatGPT was already sending commercial traffic before it became a paid media platform.
That context matters because it shows OpenAI is monetizing an existing behavior rather than trying to create one from scratch. For European companies, the self-serve rollout lowers the barrier to entry and makes ChatGPT a direct competitor to established digital ad platforms. It also suggests OpenAI is now formalizing a demand source that had already proven valuable in practice.