Earlier this year, testing an ad inside ChatGPT took at least $50,000. Today, the minimum daily budget in the US is $25.

That is the change that matters for most of us. When OpenAI opened its self-serve Ads Manager in May, it dropped the $50,000 minimum from its pilot. The standard minimum daily budget in the US is now $25. For a few months, big brands had the room to themselves. Now the door is open to a bakery, a bookkeeper, a plumber.

In my last weekly roundup, I asked whether you would try ads inside ChatGPT. I could not stop thinking about my own question. So I went digging: OpenAI's help center, its ad policies, and the first reports from advertisers who have spent real money.

I have not run a ChatGPT ad myself, and I do not own a small business, so treat this as my research notebook, not a case study.

Here is what I found, and the small, honest test I would run if I owned a small business today.

The easy story, and the real one

The easy story goes like this: the entry fee is low, the platform is new, get in early.

The real story is messier.

In July, a small-business coaching firm called Out of the Box Advisors put $500 into a ChatGPT ads test. The budget was gone in about an hour. OpenAI reported 140 clicks. The firm could account for fewer than 20 of them on its own website. Leads: zero. The verdict at the time was blunt: "I would say with 100% confidence, NO. For most small businesses, this isn't the moment."

A month later, they tried again with $175 paced over about a week and tracking that actually worked. The cost per visitor who really arrived on their site was about six times better. The advice softened, but only a little: "Treat ChatGPT ads like a science experiment, not a marketing strategy, for now."

Bigger advertisers are seeing a wide spread too. In September, Search Engine Journal gathered public reports from advertisers with costs per click ranging from under $3 to nearly $23, and noted that OpenAI says it does not yet have performance benchmarks across advertisers, industries or campaign types.

So the entry fee is not the hard part anymore. Knowing what you are testing is.

Search ads answer keywords. ChatGPT ads answer situations.

This is the part that changed how I think about the whole channel.

On Google, you bid on the words people type. In ChatGPT, there is no keyword list. According to OpenAI's help center, ads appear below ChatGPT's response and are chosen "based on expected relevance and outcomes," using the context of the conversation, your landing page, your ad copy, and something called context hints.

Context hints are short descriptions of when your business is useful. OpenAI is clear that they "are not exact-match keywords and do not guarantee delivery in specific conversations."

One more thing every small business owner should know before spending a dollar. OpenAI says plainly: "Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you." The ad sits under the answer, labeled as an ad. You are not buying your way into the recommendation. You are buying a spot next to it.

That makes the job very specific. You are not competing for a word. You are competing for a moment.

A small, honest test in five steps

1. Check that you are allowed in the room. As of October 2026, OpenAI's ad policies allow lifestyle and household goods, local services, travel and experiences, and digital products or education. Financial services, healthcare and legal services are restricted to the US and approved case by case. A long list is prohibited outright, including alcohol, gambling, dating apps, individual job listings, housing rentals or sales, and unsupported wellness claims. Then check your customer. OpenAI describes its ads as running for Free and Go users, and its help center confirms ads are not shown on Plus, Pro or any Business plan, or to users identified as under 18. If your buyers mostly use ChatGPT through a work account, this may not be your channel yet.

2. Write the situation, not the keyword. OpenAI's guide to context hints suggests describing what you offer, who it is for, and when it helps. Their own example is a perfect small-business sentence: "After-hours residential plumbing in [city], with an $89 service-call fee for urgent repairs." Hints cannot control where your ad shows, so use location targeting for that. For most campaign types, you can target cities and postal codes where available. Skip custom audiences for now. They need at least 25,000 matched users, which rules most of us out.

3. Send people to the page that answers them. OpenAI recommends linking to the most relevant page, not your homepage, and adding your own UTM tags. One easy-to-miss detail from the same page: your site must not block OpenAI's crawlers, OAI-AdsBot and OAI-SearchBot. And one from me, borrowed from Out of the Box Advisors, who learned it the expensive way: click your own tagged link before launch and confirm the tracking actually arrives.

4. Do the budget math before you launch. OpenAI recommends starting with a maximum bid of $3 to $5 per click. If your clicks really cost $3 to $5, the $25 minimum buys five to eight a day. Treat that as a rough guide, not a promise: the advertisers in Search Engine Journal's roundup paid anywhere from under $3 to nearly $23. Know two things about daily budgets: they average over a seven-day week, and a single day can spend up to twice your daily amount. If you want a hard ceiling, OpenAI calls a campaign-total budget "the stricter control for total spend."

5. Decide what "worth it" means before you spend. There are no industry benchmarks yet, so your own numbers are the only benchmark you have. Before launch, write down one number: the most you can pay for a lead or an order and still make money. That number is how you judge the test. Not the click-through rate. Not the hype.

What this could look like

Here is a hypothetical, so you can see the steps working together.

A small cake studio in Minneapolis wants more custom birthday orders. Its context hint: "Custom birthday cakes in Minneapolis, ordered online with 48-hour pickup, for parents planning a party this week." The ad links straight to the custom order page, with UTM tags checked by hand. The location is set to the Minneapolis area. The budget is a campaign total of $350 over 14 days, with the Clicks objective.

If clicks cost $3 to $5, that is roughly 70 to 115 clicks. If they cost more, fewer. If an average order is $80, the studio needs five orders just to earn back the ad spend, before ingredients and time. So the rule is decided on day one, based on profit, not revenue: if the orders do not cover the ad spend and the cost of making the cakes, rewrite the hints or stop.

That is the whole experiment. One sentence, one page, one number.

"Isn't it too early?"

Honestly? A little.

There are no benchmarks. Advertisers report uneven traffic quality and tracking that does not always line up. The audience is limited to Free and Go users. If you only have $350 for marketing this quarter, I would not put all of it here.

But there are two reasons I would still run a small test.

First, the cost of learning is capped. You set the ceiling, and the platform is still new enough that what you learn about your own customers is genuinely new information.

Second, the most useful part of this test is not the ad at all. It is the sentence. If you cannot describe the moment your customer needs you in one plain line, that is a problem on your website, your Google profile and your social bios too. As I wrote in the roundup, an AI agent can only answer customers as well as the information you give it. Writing your context hints forces you to give it something good.

The honest part

I will be real: I get wary whenever a platform tells small businesses to get in early. Usually the people saying it are the ones selling the ticket.

What changed my mind was not the ad format. It was the shift underneath it. People are starting to describe their problems to an AI in full sentences, and the businesses that can describe their solution just as clearly will have an advantage, paid or not.

Try this before you spend a dollar

Open ChatGPT on a free account and ask the question your customer would ask. "Who can fix a leaking pipe tonight in [your city]?" "Where can I order a custom birthday cake by Saturday?" Look below the answer. You may see an ad, you may not. Either way, you learn something about the room.

Then write three situation sentences for your business: what you offer, who it is for, and when they need it. Do not spend a dollar yet.

Earlier this year, $50,000 kept small businesses out of the room. Now $25 lets us in. What we say once we are inside is still up to us.

Can you describe the moment your customer needs you in one sentence?

Sources

If this was useful, the next piece looks at the other half of the screen: how to show up in ChatGPT's answers without paying for it. Subscribe so you do not miss it.