OpenAI has started showing ads to ChatGPT users in India, marking the advertising business's first major rollout in an emerging market and its biggest audience expansion since the program began. According to TechCrunch, ads will appear on the ChatGPT Free and Go subscription tiers, where the large majority of OpenAI's Indian users sit.

The company said it is starting with campaigns for 50 brands and has signed partnerships with the advertising agencies WPP and Omnicom. An ad manager that lets marketers create campaigns directly is scheduled to launch next month, with a daily minimum budget of 725 rupees — about $7.60 — a threshold low enough to court small businesses, not just national brands. For more context on this story, see our ongoing AI industry coverage.

"With ChatGPT Ads, businesses of every size can introduce themselves at relevant, high-context moments when decisions are beginning to take shape," Dave Dugan, OpenAI's head of global ads solutions, said in a statement reported by TechCrunch.

Why India Is the Big Prize

India is OpenAI's largest user market outside the United States. The company said in February that ChatGPT had more than 100 million weekly active users in the country, a huge share of them on the free or lower-priced Go tiers. That makes India the natural testing ground for an ad model that monetizes free users at scale.

The rollout follows a deliberate, two-year playbook. OpenAI launched the sub-$5 ChatGPT Go plan in India in August 2025, ran a limited promotion that made the tier free for a full year, and bought heavy advertising during the Indian Premier League and Women's Premier League cricket seasons to build consumer awareness. More recently it hired Uber's India head to lead its expansion in the country.

OpenAI India managing director Prabhjeet Singh told Indian media outlet Storyboard18 that "answers stay independent" as the ads roll out — the company's core reassurance to users worried that sponsored content could influence the chatbot's responses.

From Experiment to Core Business Line

The India launch completes a rapid global expansion. OpenAI began showing ads to U.S. users in February and extended the program across 31 European markets earlier this month. In the span of six months, sponsored placements have gone from experiment to a standing feature of the free ChatGPT experience across three major regions.

The monetization push comes ahead of a potential IPO that TechCrunch reports is expected this year or next. The Wall Street Journal has reported that OpenAI recorded revenue of $6.7 billion in the quarter ended June 2026, up from $5.7 billion the previous quarter. And The Information reported last November that OpenAI was aiming for 220 million paying subscribers by 2030, up from 35 million paying Plus and Pro users at the time of that report.

Advertising is the obvious lever for that gap: the free tier's enormous audience — over 100 million weekly users in India alone — currently generates subscription revenue of zero.

What Advertisers Get — and What Could Go Wrong

For brands, ChatGPT ads promise something search and social never had: placement at the moment a user is actively reasoning through a decision, whether that is choosing a software tool, planning a trip, or comparing insurance. The WPP and Omnicom partnerships signal that OpenAI wants sophisticated agency-mediated campaigns from day one rather than a purely self-serve pipeline.

The risks are equally clear. OpenAI changed its terms of service earlier this month to enable ads, and user reaction in the U.S. and Europe has been mixed, with privacy advocates questioning how conversational context is used for targeting. OpenAI has said it does not use chat conversations to personalize ads, but the company will now operate at a scale where any targeting misstep becomes a headline.

There is also a competitive question. Google has begun placing ads in its own AI experiences, and Perplexity has experimented with sponsored follow-ups. Whoever proves that users will tolerate — and advertisers will pay for — ads inside an AI assistant first could define the category's norms. With 100 million weekly Indian users now in the pool, OpenAI just made its move.

For now, paying subscribers on Plus and Pro are unaffected, and OpenAI says the ad experience will be clearly labeled. Whether Indian users accept ads in exchange for a free frontier-quality assistant will shape how quickly — and how aggressively — the company pushes the model into other emerging markets next.

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