How to Advertise on ChatGPT as a Local Business: A Step-by-Step Setup Guide

The short answer

A local business advertises on ChatGPT through OpenAI's Ads Manager, a self-serve beta at ads.openai.com. You create an advertiser account, add a card, build a campaign targeted to your service area, group your ads by service, and send each click to a page built for that service. Ads appear below ChatGPT's answers, labeled as ads, and the click lands on your own website.

The setup takes an afternoon. Getting it right takes more care than that, because several settings lock permanently and a few common website configurations will stop your ads from passing review. This guide walks through each step in the order you will meet it, with details checked against OpenAI's Help Center on October 30, 2026. Ads Manager is still in beta and changes often, so confirm anything that matters before you rely on it.

Before you start: three things to check

Where your business is based

Self-serve access depends on where the legal entity that advertises and pays is based, not where your customers are. The United States, Canada, the UK, Australia and most of Europe are among the 89 countries OpenAI currently lists. If your country is not on the list yet, you can still create an account and be notified when it opens.

What you sell

Local services is one of the first categories OpenAI opened, which covers most trades and home services. Health, financial and legal services are restricted, and some of those categories are limited to a small group of approved advertisers. We cover the detail by industry in can my business advertise on ChatGPT.

Your website

Every ad is reviewed together with the page it links to. If the page is slow, vague or blocked to OpenAI's crawler, the ad either fails review or wastes the click. Fix the page first. It is the step most businesses skip and the one that decides whether the money works.

Step 1: Create the advertiser account

Sign up at ads.openai.com with an OpenAI login. You can paste in your website address and let Ads Manager draft a first ad from it, or skip that and build the campaign yourself. Either way, slow down at the account details screen.

Your country or region, currency and time zone cannot be changed after the account is created. Choose the country your business is registered in, the currency you want to be billed in, and the time zone you work in, because daily budgets and the reporting day both run on that clock.

The single name you enter becomes your account name, brand name and legal name. You can separate them later under Settings. The brand name is what people see beside your ad, so make it the name customers know you by. The legal name should match your registration, because it is used for billing and business verification.

If an agency will manage the campaign, create the account yourself and invite them. Ads Manager has three roles: Admins have full access, Members can build and manage campaigns, and Viewers can only look. Inviting your agency as a Member keeps the account, the billing and the history in your name if you ever change providers.

Step 2: Set up billing and verification

Billing has two parts: a billing profile with your business name, address and invoice email, and a credit card. Adding the card may place a temporary authorization hold that can stay on your statement for a week or more. It is released automatically and is not an advertising charge.

ChatGPT Ads bills after delivery. Your card is charged each time unpaid spend reaches a payment threshold, and again at the end of the month for whatever is left. New accounts start with a low threshold that rises automatically with payment history. You cannot change it, so expect several small charges early on.

Business verification can take up to seven business days. Some accounts can start delivering before verification finishes, which means spend can accrue. If you are not ready to run, pause the campaign rather than relying on an unfinished verification to hold it back.

Step 3: Build a campaign around your service area

A campaign holds the objective, budget, dates and locations. There are three objectives: Views, billed per thousand impressions; Clicks, billed per click; and Conversions, which aims delivery at an action such as a submitted lead while still billing per click or per thousand impressions. For a local business that wants calls and form fills, Clicks is the sensible place to start until conversion tracking has enough data to learn from. You cannot change the objective later, only build a new campaign.

Location is where a local business has the most control. Country is required, and to run only in the US you have to include the United States explicitly; excluding other countries is not enough. Within the US you can narrow to states, cities, markets and postal codes. A contractor in Albany can target the Capital Region ZIP codes it actually serves rather than all of New York State.

Budget is either a total for the campaign or a daily amount. The minimum daily budget in the US is $25. A daily budget is an average over a Sunday to Saturday week rather than a cap on any single day, so one day can spend up to twice the daily figure as long as the week stays within seven times it. If that would be a problem for cash flow, use a campaign-total budget, which is the stricter control.

Step 4: One ad group per service

Ad groups sit inside the campaign, and each one should cover one service or one customer need. OpenAI's own example is a plumbing business with separate ad groups for emergency repairs and preventive maintenance. The two attract different people with different urgency, and they need different ads and different landing pages.

Each ad group carries its own bid and its own context hints. Context hints are short descriptions of what you offer, who it helps and when it is useful. They help the system recognize relevant conversations, but they are not keywords and they cannot enforce geography or schedules. Writing them well is most of the craft on this platform, so we wrote a separate guide with context hint examples for each trade.

Eligible new ad groups default to Maximize results, which sets bids automatically to get as many clicks or conversions as the budget allows. It does not promise any particular cost per result. If you need a ceiling, switch to a manual maximum bid; OpenAI suggests starting cost-per-click bids at $3 to $5.

Step 5: Write the ads

An ad shows your brand name, your logo, a headline, a short description, an image and the link. Since October 26, 2026 there is also a multi-image format, in open beta, that uses four to six square images. Every image in that format links to the same page.

OpenAI's guidance favors specific, benefit-focused copy over slogans, and several distinct variations per service so the system can find more conversations where one of them fits. For a roofer that might mean one ad about storm damage inspections, one about full replacement, and one about a written estimate within 48 hours. Different angles, not the same line reworded three times.

Every claim has to be true and has to match the page. Ads are reviewed alongside their landing page, and an ad that promises something the page does not deliver, or links to content outside the approved category, will be rejected.

Step 6: Make the landing page pass review and convert

OpenAI requires that its OAI-AdsBot crawler can reach your landing page, and recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot as well. Check robots.txt, but also check your firewall, CDN and bot protection, because a challenge page or a 403 response blocks review even when robots.txt allows the crawler. Test the exact ad address, tracking parameters included, and follow every redirect to the final page.

Then make the page do its job. Send each ad group to the page for that service, not your homepage. Put the phone number and a short form near the top, state your service area, and say what happens after someone gets in touch. A person arriving from ChatGPT has usually just read an explanation of their problem. What they want now is to know whether you can fix it, where you work and how soon you can come.

Step 7: Set up tracking before you spend

Add UTM parameters to every destination address so the traffic is labeled correctly in Google Analytics. For conversion tracking inside Ads Manager, install the OpenAI Pixel on your site and, where you can, send the same events from your server through the Conversions API with a shared event ID so each one is counted once. A Google Analytics 4 connection also exists, currently in beta through an OpenAI account manager.

Expect conversions to take 24 to 48 hours to appear, and spend figures to lag by seven to eight hours. Do not judge a campaign on its first afternoon. Also expect some visits from OpenAI's review crawler to show up in analytics as paid traffic. Those visits are not billed clicks.

The most important tracking is not on the platform at all. If a form fill lands in an inbox nobody checks until evening, the ad worked and the business still lost the job. Make sure every inquiry reaches a person quickly, by text if necessary. Fast lead response matters more here than any setting in Ads Manager.

What to expect in the first month

OpenAI says plainly that it does not yet have performance benchmarks across industries or campaign types, so anyone quoting you an expected cost per lead is guessing. Plan the first month as a test: a budget you can afford to learn with, one or two services, a landing page for each, and a weekly look at clicks, cost per click and inquiries. The budget math is in what ChatGPT ads cost a local business.

Delivery can also fluctuate while the platform is in beta. A slow week is not necessarily your campaign; it can be the system. Give each change a full budget week before deciding whether it worked. If you would rather hand the whole thing off, that is what our ChatGPT ads management covers.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q: Who sees ChatGPT ads? A: People on ChatGPT's free and lower-cost plans. OpenAI does not show ads on Plus, Pro or any Business plan, or to accounts it identifies as belonging to someone under 18.

Q: Can I target only my town or ZIP codes? A: Yes, in the US. Campaigns can target states, cities, markets and postal codes where available. Writing a city into a context hint does not restrict delivery; use the campaign's location settings for that.

Q: Does ChatGPT share the conversation or the person's details with advertisers? A: No. Ads Manager reports campaign performance such as impressions, clicks, spend and conversions, not individual activity. Every inquiry starts on your own website when the person clicks.

Q: Can an agency run the account for me? A: Yes. The cleanest arrangement is that you create and own the account, add your own card, and invite the agency as a Member. OpenAI recommends one person creates the account and invites everyone else.

Q: How long until ads go live? A: Ads can deliver once they pass review and the account, billing and campaign settings allow it. Business verification can take up to seven business days, and some accounts start delivering before it finishes, so pause anything you are not ready to run.

Q: Do I need a separate landing page for each service? A: You should. Ads are reviewed with their landing page and work better when the page matches the ad. A homepage rarely answers the specific question that led someone to click.