ChatGPT starts selling ads to Free and Go users in India at ₹725 a day

OpenAI began showing advertisements inside ChatGPT in India on 27 August. The units appear under a reply when the company has a matching sponsor. They are labelled as sponsored and sit in a separate block from the model's text. The company says the ad does not change the answer.

Only logged-in users aged 18 and above on the Free tier and the Go plan will see them. Go costs ₹399 a month in India. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education remain ad-free. Accounts that belong to, or are predicted to belong to, people under 18 are excluded. Ads will not run next to health, mental health or political queries.

The commercial terms

More than 50 brands are lined up for the first week. WPP and Omnicom are the first agency partners. The arrangement is not exclusive. A self-serve Ads Manager opens on 4 September with a minimum daily budget of ₹725, about $7.60. Advertisers receive aggregate figures such as impressions and clicks. They do not receive chat logs, memories or personal details, OpenAI said.

Dave Dugan, who runs global ads at the company, described the pitch as placement at the moment a user is weighing options. That is the difference OpenAI wants against search ads. The query is already a conversation. The sponsor arrives after the model has spoken.

Why India is first

OpenAI has called India one of its largest markets. It counted more than 100 million weekly active users in the country in February. Separate industry figures put unique monthly users at 330 million in May 2026, up from 297 million in December 2025. A large share of that base sits on Free or Go. Go was priced under $5 when it launched in August 2025, and the company has used cricket inventory, including the IPL and the Women's Premier League, to fill the funnel.

The company has floated a 2026 ad-revenue target of $2.5 billion worldwide and a longer figure of $100 billion by 2030. Those numbers are company projections, not booked sales. India is the first large market where the ad product is live rather than described.

What stays unresolved

Contextual placement inside a chat is new inventory. It is also easy to get wrong. A user asking how to compare two scooter loans does not want a third brand inserted as if it were part of the answer. The visual split and the label are the safeguard OpenAI is offering. Whether users treat the block as an ad or as a continuation of the reply will decide if the format holds.

There is a second tension. Go is a paid plan. Putting ads on a paid tier, even a cheap one, cuts against the habit formed on Plus. OpenAI is betting that ₹399 buyers will accept the units in exchange for higher caps, and that Plus buyers will keep paying to avoid them. That split only works if the free and Go experience stays good enough that people do not churn the moment the first sponsor appears.

The Ads Manager date, 4 September, is when the experiment leaves the first 50 brands and becomes a market. Daily budgets of ₹725 will pull in smaller firms. The measurement those firms receive will be thin. They will know if someone clicked. They will not know what was said in the chat that produced the click.