ChatGPT Ads: advertising in ChatGPT in the Netherlands

ChatGPT Ads are ads that appear below ChatGPT's answer, clearly labelled as sponsored. You buy them through OpenAI's self-serve platform at ads.openai.com, you pay per click or per thousand impressions, and you don't steer on keywords but on context hints: a description of the conversations where your offer is relevant. In the Netherlands the rollout started in August 2026, first with selected partners and without personalisation based on earlier conversations.

This page explains how the channel works, what it costs, what is and isn't possible in the Netherlands, and how to judge it next to Google Ads. We're based in Eindhoven, we've been doing this since 2010, and we've seen enough new channels arrive to know one thing: the interesting part isn't "being there", it's knowing when to stop.

What are ChatGPT Ads?

ChatGPT Ads is OpenAI's advertising platform. An ad appears after the answer to a question, inside a conversation where someone is orienting, comparing options or preparing a decision. Three things are fixed by OpenAI:

• The ad sits below the answer and is recognisable as an ad.
• Advertisers cannot pay to influence the answer. Paid and organic are separate systems — just like SEO and paid search.
• Ads are only shown to users on the free tier and the entry-level Go plan, including logged-out sessions. Plus, Pro and Business users don't see them.

That last point sets your expectations: part of your business audience sits on a paid plan and is therefore unreachable through this channel.

Status in the Netherlands (August 2026)

OpenAI has told Dutch users that ads are being rolled out here this month. What is known:

	Netherlands	Open longer (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea)
Advertiser access	tests with selected partners first; broad access not yet announced	self-serve, open to everyone since May 2026
Personalisation	initially not personalised on earlier conversations or memory	matching also uses broader ChatGPT activity when the user allows it
Matching signal	the topic of the current conversation	current conversation plus, where permitted, broader signals

Sources: OpenAI's message to Dutch users as described by ipsis, reporting on the European rollout by Tweakers and the hands-on guide by Search Engine Land.

Practical consequence: if you want to start in the Netherlands now, plan it as preparation, not as a campaign. Get your measurement ready, build your ads and landing pages, and keep the channel on your quarterly plan.

How to set up a campaign

The structure will look familiar from Google and Meta: campaign → ad group → ad.

At campaign level you pick the objective (reach, clicks or conversions), locations to target or exclude (country, region, area or postal code), a daily or total budget, a start date and optionally a conversion event. You can also include or exclude audiences from your own data — but with a minimum of 25,000 matched users that's out of reach for most SMB advertisers.

At ad group level you set your bid, the default destination URL and your context hints.

In the ad itself: destination URL, a headline of up to 50 characters, a description of up to 100 characters and a square image of at least 256 by 256 pixels (PNG or JPG). Besides these static ads there are product ads based on a product feed, with price and star rating in the card.

The auction is a relevance-weighted second-price auction: as with Google, it isn't only your bid that decides who shows, but also the relevance of your ad and your landing page.

Context hints: no keywords, but direction

There are no keywords, no demographics and no in-market audiences. Apart from location and your own data, your only real lever is a free-text field at ad group level describing the conversations, topics or terms where your offer is relevant. OpenAI states explicitly that it guides matching and is not exact-match targeting.

Three ways to fill that field:

1. A list of keywords, as you would use in Google Ads.
2. A list of complete questions someone might ask ChatGPT.
3. One descriptive prompt about who you want to reach and why.

In a Search Engine Land test with two identical ads, the keyword variant was shown clearly more often, with a slightly higher CTR and a lower average CPC than the full-question variant. One test, one market — but it makes the point: don't start with the most conversational variant just because it feels right. Run both in two ad groups with the same ad and let the numbers decide.

What do ChatGPT Ads cost?

• Daily budgets from around $25. The $50,000–$200,000 minimums from the pilot phase are gone, which opens the channel to smaller advertisers.
• Average CPCs of roughly $2 to $5 across industries, based on Search Engine Land's early campaigns. Set a max CPC below $3 and the platform warns your ad may not deliver.
• Pay per click (CPC), per thousand impressions (CPM) or optimised towards conversions — with conversion optimisation you still pay per click, with a bid cap.

There are no reliable cost-per-lead figures for the Netherlands yet. So don't plan on an assumption: use a test budget you can afford to lose — one month, one clear goal, one landing page and a ceiling where you stop.

Honest about returns: what the first numbers show

In a comparison of roughly 1,500 users on the same website, traffic from ChatGPT Ads performed clearly worse than traffic from Google Ads:

Metric (GA4)	Google Ads	ChatGPT Ads
Average engagement time per user	41 seconds	17 seconds
Engaged sessions per user	1.13	0.88
Conversion rate	3.71%	0.21%

Source: Search Engine Land. It's one dataset on one website, so not a law of nature. But it's why we currently recommend this channel as a test alongside your existing campaigns rather than a replacement. Judge it on what a customer costs you, not on how new it is.

At the same time you reach people who aren't searching on Google at that moment. That's exactly the value you're testing.

The pitfall nobody mentions: paid visibility under an organic recommendation

Before your ad appears, ChatGPT has already answered the question. If that answer names a competitor and your ad sits below it, you're buying visibility underneath advice that sends the user elsewhere. That isn't a technical problem, it's a positioning problem.

Which is why this channel belongs with your work on AI visibility: making sure your company gets named on its own when someone asks your type of question. Compare it to the relationship between SEO and SEA: organic lays the foundation, paid accelerates. For generative AI the paid side is now called GEA (generative engine advertising), against GEO for the organic side. The labels matter less than the question underneath: are you named for the questions your customers ask, and if not, who is?

What you can do now, even without an ad account:

• Ask the ten questions your customers would ask AI and note which companies get named.
• Check whether your own content really answers those questions: definition, approach, costs, pitfalls — in plain language.
• Make sure facts about your company are consistent and findable: services, city, price indications, client stories.
• Start measuring traffic from AI tools now, so you have a baseline later.

Measurement: do this before you switch anything on

Without measurement this channel is a black box with an invoice. So set up:

• OpenAI's pixel, with events on the actions that are worth money to you and dynamic values where possible (order value, for instance).
• The Conversions API for conversions that don't happen in the browser.
• UTM parameters on every ad URL, so you see the traffic in GA4 and your CRM too, instead of depending on OpenAI's reporting alone.

Know what you don't get: no conversation data, and no view of which topics triggered your ad. Reporting can only be split by country, even if you targeted more precisely. To compare regions, run separate campaigns.

Is this channel for you?

Worth testing if you already see visitors arriving from ChatGPT, if your offer needs explaining (comparing, choosing, orienting) and if you have a landing page that handles one question well.

Not yet if your audience mostly sits on paid ChatGPT plans, if your conversion tracking isn't in place, or if your Google Ads account still leaves basic wins on the table — wasted keywords, weak landing pages, no proper conversion tracking. Fixing that pays more right now than a new channel.

How we approach it

We don't build a separate "AI strategy". We put ChatGPT Ads next to your existing channels, measured the same way:

1. Baseline — what traffic and enquiries already come from AI tools, and for which questions are you named or not?
2. Foundation — content and technology set up so you can be named organically, plus measurement that holds up.
3. Test — two ad groups with different context hints, one landing page, a fixed budget and an agreed ceiling.
4. Decision — compare cost per lead with your other channels and conclude honestly: scale, adjust or stop.

Want to know whether this makes sense for your market? Book a call and we'll look at your current channels and what AI visibility can realistically bring you.