ChatGPT started showing ads outside America on Tuesday — five countries at once
OpenAI extended its advertising test to the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea on 11 August, six months after it began in the United States in February. Ads appear below the model's answer and are shown to Free and Go users; Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education accounts stay ad-free. Where personalisation is switched on, selection can draw on the current conversation, past chats and previous interactions with ads. Users can dismiss an ad, ask why it was shown, open an ads history listing brands and timestamps, and delete their ad data. OpenAI says advertisers receive only aggregate metrics rather than chat contents, and that ads do not influence the answers the model gives.
Why it mattersThe claim worth holding onto is the last one. Search engines said the same thing, and the boundary between an answer and a placement thinned every year the money grew. Right now the mechanism is legible and separable: the ad sits below the response, you are told why you got it, and you can wipe the data behind it. Write that baseline down. The question is not what this looks like in its first month outside America — it is whether it still looks like this once the revenue becomes something OpenAI cannot do without.
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