OpenAI is already working with advertisers to test showing ads to ChatGPT users, and could launch the service commercially as early as next month, according to a news report.

The company announced only last week its plans to insert ads in chats with its AI bots, something CEO Sam Altman once said would be a “last resort” for the company.

Advertisers will initially pay per impression (PPM), and not per click (PPC) as is more common with web-based advertising, The Information reported on Wednesday, citing two people familiar with the company’s plans.

The PPM model will bring in revenue for OpenAI even if users do not interact with the ads but will give advertisers little indication of the impact of their spending.

OpenAI has touted early access to the service to dozens of advertisers, who have each been asked to commit to spend less than $1 million over a trial period of several weeks, the report said, citing the same sources. No details of pricing for the service have been released, so there’s no telling how many impressions the testers will get for their money.

The company is clearly still building the infrastructure for the service: It won’t offer the advertisers self-service tools for buying and managing their ads during the test phase, as it is still working on the technology, the report said.

OpenAI unveiled its plans to slip ads into chats with its bots last Friday, the same day it unveiled ChatGPT Go, a new $8/month pricing tier that will be supported by advertising. Ads will also be displayed to users of its free service, but not (yet) to users of the $20/month ChatGPT Plus or $200/month ChatGPT Pro tiers, or to enterprise customers.

In December, ChatGPT appeared to jump the gun, showing what users took for ads, but that were in fact simply the app suggestions OpenAI announced in October.

Last resort

Altman told attendees at a May 2024 Harvard Business School event, “I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model,” adding, “I would do it if it meant that was the only way to get everybody in the world access to great services, but if we can find something that doesn’t do that, I would prefer that.”

The company’s rushed announcement of the ad service on Friday, before it was ready for testing, prompted speculation that it had failed to find other ways to fund its operations.

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar took to the company’s blog over the weekend to refute such concerns, saying that while the company’s compute costs are tripling every year, so is its revenue. Compute capacity grew from 0.2 GW in 2023 to 0.6 GW in 2024 and around 1.9 GW in 2025, Friar wrote, while “ARR” rose from $2 billion in 2023 to $6 billion in 2024 and over $20 billion in 2025.

But there were some critical omissions from Friar’s post.

She didn’t spell out what she meant by ARR. One meaning, annual recurring revenue, can be a reliable, if hard-to-calculate, indicator of a company’s future fortunes, measuring present (and likely future) spend from committed customers. But the abbreviation can also have a much looser sense, annual run rate, which is typically calculated as the best or most-recent month’s revenue multiplied by 12 — an easily inflated measure of performance for fast-growing companies like OpenAI, or those with more volatile month-to-month performance.

Most notably, Friar did not say whether OpenAI’s ARR, by either definition, matched or exceeded its costs, key for the company’s long-term survival.

The bottom line

If OpenAI is counting on advertising to bolster its bottom line, the bottom line is exactly where they will appear during the test phase, as the company intends to add them at the end of answers in ChatGPT, clearly labelled as “Sponsored” and separated from what it calls the “organic” answer written by its AI model.

In the blog post announcing the imminent introduction of the service, it suggested that users might choose to ask questions about an ad in order to make a purchase decision, hinting at why it is favoring pay-per-impression over pay-per-click: Those questions could provide advertisers with the interaction data they crave, and answering them could potentially open up another monetization stream for OpenAI.