OpenAI is taking another step toward building a full-fledged advertising platform.
The company has begun testing a new ad format inside ChatGPT that allows multiple advertisers to appear within a single sponsored placement. The move expands the amount of ad inventory available in ChatGPT while giving advertisers more opportunities to reach users during product research and purchase-related conversations.
According to an update sent to advertisers, the test is currently limited to a small subset of ChatGPT ads.
Until now, sponsored placements have generally featured a single advertiser. Under the new test, ChatGPT can display multiple relevant advertisers within the same ad unit.
OpenAI says eligible ads will be sold through a second-price auction model, a pricing approach commonly used across digital advertising platforms in which the highest bidder wins but pays slightly more than the next-highest bid.
The company says the goal is to improve product discovery for users while increasing opportunities for advertisers to engage with high-intent audiences.
For marketers, the test offers an early glimpse into how OpenAI may evolve its advertising business as competition for AI-driven discovery traffic intensifies.
Ads Manager gains more familiar features
Alongside the new ad format, OpenAI is adding several campaign management features designed to make its platform look more like the ad systems marketers already use.
Advertisers can now convert existing campaigns from lifetime budgets to daily budgets and clone CPM campaigns into CPC campaigns with a single click. Impression-based campaigns also now support custom CPM maximum bids.
The company has added bulk editing tools in Ads Manager and announced that daily budgets will transition to an average daily budget model, providing greater flexibility for weekly pacing.
Taken together, the updates reduce some of the operational friction advertisers often encounter when managing campaigns across multiple platforms.
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International expansion continues
OpenAI is also expanding geographic targeting options.
Previously, advertisers could target users in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The platform now supports targeting in the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, and Mexico.
The expansion gives advertisers access to a broader set of international markets and signals OpenAI’s continued investment in growing its advertising ecosystem beyond English-speaking regions.
What marketers should watch
The new ad format may be the most significant announcement in the update.
Allowing multiple advertisers to compete within a single placement increases inventory without requiring OpenAI to dramatically increase the number of ads shown to users. It also creates a more competitive auction environment that could eventually influence pricing and campaign performance.
The test may also offer clues about OpenAI’s long-term monetization strategy. If multi-advertiser placements perform well, they could become a larger part of the company’s advertising inventory and play a growing role in how brands reach consumers during AI-assisted research and buying journeys.