The inconvenient news first
Ads in ChatGPT are real, but you cannot book them from Switzerland right now. OpenAI publishes a country list for the Ads Manager, and as of late July 2026 it contains exactly seven markets: Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Switzerland is not among them, not even as an announced market.
We put this bluntly because plenty of claims to the contrary are circulating. Anyone trying to sell you a ChatGPT campaign for a Swiss SME today should be able to explain precisely how that would work. All you can currently do is register interest with OpenAI for future markets.
What the ads look like
There is currently a single format. The ad appears below the answer, is labelled as sponsored and is visually separated from the text. It consists of these building blocks:
- Advertiser name and favicon
- Title: 50 characters maximum, 16 to 24 recommended.
- Ad copy: 100 characters maximum, 32 to 48 recommended.
- A square image, currently up to 1200 by 1200 pixels
- A link to your landing page
The exact limits are in OpenAI's bulk upload schema checklist. Older figures of 30 and 60 characters, quoted in many articles, are out of date. And OpenAI explicitly notes that formats may still change during the beta.
The language model stays independent
This was the point we cared about most, and OpenAI is unambiguous: ads run on separate systems and do not influence the answers. Advertisers can neither reorder nor buy responses.
The privacy line is equally clear. Advertisers receive only aggregated metrics such as impressions, clicks, spend, click-through rate and conversions. No chats, no history, no names, no email addresses, no precise location. One exception: if someone messages a business directly through an ad, that business naturally sees its own messages. The details are in the official FAQ on ads in ChatGPT.
Important for your reach expectations: ads are only shown to Free and Go users, not on Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise or Edu. Not to minors, not in temporary chats. No ads run against sensitive topics such as health or politics, and political advertising is currently not allowed at all.
What the channel costs
OpenAI offers three campaign objectives: CPM for reach, CPC for clicks, and oCPC, which optimises for conversions while still charging per click. The auction is a relevance-weighted second-price auction, and you set your maximum bid at ad group level.
Two numbers are documented. First, a minimum spend of 25 US dollars per campaign per day or the local equivalent, for example 15 pounds in the UK. Second, a bidding recommendation: OpenAI suggests starting CPC campaigns with a maximum bid of 3 to 5 US dollars per click. Both are in the campaign guide and the basics of ads in ChatGPT.
What you will not find anywhere are real prices. OpenAI states itself that there are no benchmarks yet across advertisers, industries and campaign types. If someone quotes you a specific click price range for ChatGPT, that is an estimate, not a market figure. An earlier version of this article included such a range, and we removed it because it could not be substantiated.
What we do not know yet
Staying honest also means naming the open questions. Whether buying intent in ChatGPT really is higher than in Google search, whether competition stays cheaper long term and whether wasted spend actually drops: these are plausible assumptions, but there is no solid data behind them yet. The channel is in beta, and beta means formats, prices and rules will change.
What Swiss SMEs can sensibly do now
Waiting is not a strategy, but preparing is. Three things pay off regardless of when the channel arrives here:
- Build visibility in the organic answers. ChatGPT names brands without advertising too. What that depends on is covered in our article on Google and AI search.
- Get the landing page right. A click from a chat hits the same page as a click from Google. If it is weak, no new channel will save it.
- Set up measurement properly. When the channel arrives you want to see on day one what it delivers. Why that cannot be retrofitted is covered in More ad budget does not fix a tracking problem.
And if you have a subsidiary in one of the seven available markets, a controlled test is genuinely worthwhile. Just go in knowing that you are paying tuition for a channel nobody has reliable numbers on yet.
Status of this article: 31 July 2026. We will update it as soon as availability changes. If you want to know whether the channel could pay off for your offer, just get in touch.
