ChatGPT Ads in Belgium: costs, rules and figures

Since 24 August 2026 ChatGPT has shown ads in Belgium ^[1], ^[2], and since 31 August a Belgian company can set up campaigns itself via ads.openai.com ^[3], ^[4]. You pay per click or per thousand impressions, with a minimum of €15 a day per campaign ^[5]. Legal services, most health services and many financial products are not allowed ^[6].

As a ChatGPT Ads agency we set up campaigns for companies that want to start on ChatGPT, and we also advertise there ourselves, for izoard.be. The figures from that campaign are further down, next to the only other Belgian figures we found in public.

Can your business advertise?

The company that advertises and is invoiced must be established in a country where Ads Manager is available; Belgium is on that list ^[7]. After that, your sector decides. Not allowed are, among others ^[8]:

• adult content and services, including dating apps;
• alcohol (above 0.5%), tobacco, vapes and nicotine products;
• gambling and political ads;
• drugs and health claims;
• ads for individual job vacancies and for renting or selling homes.

Outside the US, and so in Belgium too, extra restrictions apply ^[6]:

If you are a lawyer, doctor or credit broker, ChatGPT Ads is not an option today. Renovation, travel, training, software and local services are not covered by these restrictions. OpenAI does not show ads in sensitive conversations, such as about politics or mental health, and the list may still change ^[9], ^[8].

What does advertising on ChatGPT cost?

You choose how you pay: per thousand impressions (CPM) or per click (CPC) ^[10]. If you choose conversions as your goal, ChatGPT optimises for them, but you still pay per click or per thousand impressions ^[5], ^[11]. Which ad wins is decided by a second-price auction, weighted for relevance ^[10].

The minimum is €15 a day per campaign if you pay in euros ^[5]. That daily budget is an average over the week: on a single day ChatGPT can spend up to twice as much, but over the week never more than seven times your daily budget ^[12]. At the minimum, count on about €450 a month.

OpenAI does not publish average click prices. It recommends starting CPC campaigns with a maximum bid of 3 to 5 dollars per click ^[10], and says there are no benchmarks per sector yet ^[13]. Anyone who quotes you an "average ChatGPT CPC" is usually quoting that starting bid. The public Belgian figures we found:

Billing happens afterwards, on the credit card you save in Ads Manager ^[11]. Verifying your business can take up to seven working days ^[6]; plan for that.

What our own campaign teaches us

We have been advertising on ChatGPT for izoard.be since 1 September 2026. From 14 to 27 September inclusive, that produced 14,236 impressions and 125 clicks, at an average of €13.51 per thousand impressions ^[14].

• The click price is reasonable. €1.49 is below the starting bid OpenAI recommends. We expect it to rise as more Belgian advertisers come in, but that is an expectation, not a measurement.
• The CTR is modest. Two accounts with different ads say little about the channel, but they do say something about how much testing is still needed.
• A click is not a customer. Whether a channel works shows in the cost per enquiry next to your other channels. That is why we work with a twelve-week pilot before we give advice.

Who sees the ads, and how?

• Yes: users of the free plan and of Go. People who are not logged in can only see ads that are suitable for everyone ^[9].
• No: subscribers to Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu, temporary chats and accounts that OpenAI identifies as belonging to a minor ^[9].
• Not personalised, for now. Personalised ads are initially not available in the EEA and Switzerland ^[9]. So what a user in Belgium sees depends on the conversation itself.
• No conversations for advertisers. You get aggregated figures, not chats, names or email addresses, and you cannot steer ChatGPT's answers ^[9].

The ad appears below the answer, labelled as sponsored ^[9], with your company name, logo, a title, a short text, an image and a link ^[10]. OpenAI recommends a title of 16 to 24 characters (maximum 50) and a text of 32 to 48 characters (maximum 100), with a square image of up to 1200 × 1200 pixels ^[16].

Your landing page must not block OpenAI's crawlers: ad pages are checked by OAI-AdsBot ^[16], ^[17]. That is a different crawler from OAI-SearchBot, which determines whether you appear organically; how to allow it is covered in how to get found in ChatGPT.

How you target: context hints instead of keywords

Per ad group, you use context hints to describe the conversations and situations your offer fits. They are not exact keywords, they don't guarantee an impression and they don't enforce a region or time of day ^[18]. On top of that you choose countries, where supported also regions, cities or postcodes, and platforms ^[5].

There is no language setting for advertisers; OpenAI does take the language of the conversation into account ^[9]. So create separate ads and context hints in Dutch and French.

Measuring and getting started

You measure conversions with the OpenAI Pixel on your site and the Conversions API from your server. The pixel stores the click ID in its own cookie, and OpenAI points out that you should ask for consent where the law requires it ^[19]. So only load the pixel after consent in your cookie banner; Cédric explains how in Consent Mode v2 in practice.

How to start:

1. Check your sector in OpenAI's ad policies and country table.
2. Open an account at ads.openai.com, in the name of your Belgian company.
3. Install the pixel, preferably with the Conversions API, behind your cookie consent.
4. Check your landing pages: fast, clear and not blocked for OpenAI.
5. Write context hints and ads per language, based on the questions your customers really ask.
6. Decide after a fixed period, on cost per enquiry next to Google and Meta, not on click price.

You can buy an ad; you cannot buy a mention in the answer itself. How AI search engines choose their sources is covered in how ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity choose their sources.

Want to know first how visible you already are organically? The free scan makes a baseline measurement in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.