ChatGPT Ads in Spain: a practical guide to advertising in AI assistants (2026)

ChatGPT Ads is advertising in ChatGPT: the ads OpenAI shows inside its assistant. It has been live in Spain since 24 August 2026, when ads began serving in 31 European markets: the 27 EU member states plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.

OpenAI began testing ads in the United States on 9 February 2026 and switched them on in Europe on 24 August. What we say here rests on reporting by Digiday and Notebookcheck (August 2026) and on OpenAI's crawler documentation.

It matters because the habit is already there: according to a Bain & Company study published in April 2026, 22% of Spanish consumers say they have replaced search engines with generative AI most of the time. Two caveats: ChatGPT is not a shop, because OpenAI retired in-chat purchasing (Instant Checkout), as reported in March 2026, and an ad does not buy recommendations: being cited in the answer is earned through content and reputation, as we explain in how to appear in ChatGPT.

ChatGPT ads are shown only to adult users on the Free and Go plans. Anyone paying for Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise or Edu sees no advertising, and users identified as under 18 are excluded.

If your buyer uses ChatGPT through their company's Business or Enterprise account, they will not see your ad, which matters in B2B campaigns. And reach depends on how many relevant conversations exist in your category, not on the size of an audience you define. In summary:

• See ads: adult users on the Free and Go plans.
• See no ads: Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu subscribers.
• Excluded: users identified as under 18.
• Ad-free conversations: physical or mental health, and politics.
• Prohibited ads: political advertising.

Contextual means the ad is chosen by what is being discussed, not by who the person is. In the European Economic Area and Switzerland, ChatGPT does not initially offer personalised ads: selection relies on the context of the conversation, approximate location and language.

For anyone used to remarketing, this is a deep change: at launch there are no audiences built from a profile, only moments. Someone comparing hotels for a short break or asking how to choose invoicing software describes their need in their own words, and the ad competes to be useful then.

The trend is not unique to OpenAI: in the European Union, Meta offers a 'less personalised ads' option, revised from January 2026. And because language is one of the signals, it pays to prepare native ads and landing pages in every language people ask in; in destinations such as Mallorca, that means at least Spanish and English.

There are two ways in: managed access, through OpenAI's team and agencies, and the self-serve ChatGPT Ads Manager, opened in beta on 31 August 2026 to eligible European advertisers. Because it is a beta, its features and requirements are provisional.

Published reports disagree on the exact number of countries where the Ads Manager is open: it is dozens, including the whole of the European Union. The details come from Digiday (31 August 2026) and may have changed, so check your own account.

Choosing between self-serve and managed is a question of resources: an agency brings a testing method, creative and measurement, which is what our ChatGPT and AI assistant advertising service covers. Either way, if you are working out how to advertise on ChatGPT, order matters more than speed:

• Confirm that your sector and offer are eligible.
• Choose your route: self-serve or management through an agency.
• Prepare landing pages that answer the question triggering the ad.
• Get measurement ready: defined conversions, tagged URLs and consent in order.
• Design a capped test with a goal, a duration, a spending limit and a success criterion.

OAI-AdsBot is the crawler OpenAI uses to check landing pages submitted as ChatGPT ads. If your robots.txt, CDN or firewall blocks it, the page review may fail: verify that access first.

Do not confuse it with OpenAI's other agents: blocking GPTBot, the training crawler, does not remove you from ChatGPT search; blocking OAI-SearchBot does. And robots.txt is not the whole story: since July 2025, Cloudflare has blocked known AI crawlers by default and asks new domains to choose whether to let them in, a check that belongs to technical SEO.

Because the purchase does not happen inside ChatGPT, the landing page must continue the conversation: answer the question that triggered the ad, in the same language and with an obvious next step, which is the territory of conversion rate optimisation. For measurement, your own analytics is the reference point, and incrementality tests show whether the channel adds new sales. Before launch:

• OAI-AdsBot can reach your destination URLs: robots.txt, CDN and firewall checked.
• Each ad leads to a page that answers its question, in the same language.
• URLs are tagged, and conversions are defined and tested.
• The cookie banner follows the cookie guide of the AEPD, Spain's data protection authority: rejecting is as easy as accepting.

As of 1 October 2026, ChatGPT is the only AI assistant with confirmed advertising in Spain. Here, Google shows ads above or below its AI Overviews but not inside them; AI Mode is only testing ads in the United States; Copilot depends on the market; and Perplexity, the Gemini app and Claude are not paid channels.

An assistant without ads is not an irrelevant one: on Perplexity, Gemini and Claude presence is earned organically, through generative engine optimisation (GEO). Here is the summary channel by channel:

• ChatGPT: live in Spain since 24 August 2026; Free and Go plans; contextual.
• Google, above or below AI Overviews: available in Spain through Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns.
• Google, inside AI Overviews: not available in Spain or the EU; English only, in 12 countries including the United States, Canada, Australia and India.
• Google AI Mode: in testing in the United States, with no date for the EU.
• Microsoft Copilot: a placement within Microsoft Advertising, not a campaign type; it varies by market and is not confirmed for Spain.
• Perplexity: no ads; it wound down its programme, as the Financial Times reported in February 2026.
• Gemini app: no ads as of mid-2026; Google denied a December 2025 report that they were coming.
• Claude: no ads; Anthropic made that pledge on 4 February 2026.

On Google you do not book an 'AI Mode' campaign: eligibility for its AI formats comes mainly through AI Max for Search and Performance Max. Those formats are being tested in the United States and have no date for the European Union, but the campaigns that would feed them are already managed in Spain.

At Google Marketing Live on 20 May 2026, Google presented AI Mode formats such as Conversational Discovery ads, Highlighted Answers and Business Agent for Leads. In October 2025 it had said it had not disclosed any plans to bring ads in AI Mode to the EU, and in September 2026 it confirmed a small experiment letting exact- and phrase-match keywords serve in AI Mode for direct-intent queries.

AI Max is not a campaign type but an optimisation layer inside Search: search term matching, text customisation and final URL expansion, with brand and location controls. Google scheduled the automatic upgrade to AI Max for September 2026 for campaigns using campaign-level broad match or automatically created assets; Dynamic Search Ads also move to AI Max and will be retired in February 2027. Microsoft has offered its own AI Max for Search to all advertisers since 27 August 2026.

The practical reading: your Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns can already appear above or below AI Overviews and, if AI Mode formats reach Europe, they can be expected to arrive through those same campaigns. Performance Max is also less of a black box than it was: since 2025 it has offered campaign-level negative keywords, a search terms report and channel performance reporting. Keeping the structure and measurement of your Google Ads account in order is the best preparation.

We use GEM (generative engine marketing) to mean paid visibility inside AI assistants and AI search: an ad in a ChatGPT conversation or beside an AI answer from Google. It is our label, not an industry standard, and no ad platform uses it as a product name.

The term has no single definition. In academic research (GEM-Bench, posted on arXiv in September 2025) it describes ads inserted into the responses of language models, and some agencies use it loosely for organic AI visibility. That is why we define it once and use it the same way throughout.

The practical distinction is simple: GEM is paid for and measured as advertising; GEO is earned through content, sound technical foundations and reputation, as we explain in what generative engine optimisation is. In Spain, as of October 2026, GEM comes down to ChatGPT Ads and the search campaigns that sit around Google's AI answers.

Three areas have clear limits. ChatGPT shows no ads next to conversations about physical or mental health or politics, and it prohibits political ads. Google, in the countries where ads do run inside AI Overviews, excludes sensitive categories such as healthcare, finance, alcohol, gambling and politics.

Health. For a clinic, the conversations in which a patient does their research are precisely the ones that carry no ads; visibility there is earned through expert content and reputation, the approach we set out for private clinics, aesthetics and wellness. Healthcare advertising also has its own rules in Spain, which your legal adviser should review.

Finance. Google's exclusion applies to a format that is not live in Spain. On ChatGPT, the exclusions we have verified concern health and politics; in banking, insurance or investment, check the policies in force first.

Politics and minors. Meta and Google stopped serving political ads in the European Union in October 2025. ChatGPT excludes users identified as under 18, and the Digital Services Act bars platforms from showing profiling-based ads to minors. In education, that means planning campaigns for adults: families and students aged 18 or over.

The fit is better where decisions are made in conversation and avoid those topics. A sector such as hospitality, travel and tourism, where customers plan with long questions before booking, is a good candidate.

Prepare three things before you spend: an account in your company's name, creative written to answer specific questions and a capped test budget with a success criterion agreed in advance. There are no reliable benchmarks yet, so any 'average ChatGPT ads cost' you read deserves scepticism.

Account and creative. The account and its data should be yours. Start from an intent map, the questions someone asks before booking, hiring or buying, and write one ad per intent, with a promise the landing page keeps. An AI creative studio speeds up variants, always with human review.

Budget. We give no figure because there is none we can stand behind: the buying model and the terms in force are whatever the platform shows at the time. Set an amount you can afford to spend on learning, a fixed period and a comparison with your own search campaigns.

In AI in advertising we look at what the platforms already create and test for you. Before it starts, a well-designed test answers these questions in writing:

• What do you want to learn: capturing new demand or reinforcing search?
• Which intents do you cover, and with which landing page for each?
• How much will you spend, for how long, and compared with what?
• What will you do if it works, and what if it does not?

Five fronts could date this guide quickly, tied to undated decisions by OpenAI, Google and Microsoft. This page was last reviewed on 1 October 2026.

In its June 2026 report, WPP Media estimates generative search ad revenue at around 5.1 billion US dollars in 2026 and forecasts that it will exceed 100 billion by 2030. That is a forecast, not a fact. What does not change is the foundation: a clear website, measurement you own and organic presence in AI answers. This is what we check at every update:

• ChatGPT Ads Manager: the end of the beta, new formats and reporting options.
• Personalisation in Europe: not available at launch in the EEA or Switzerland.
• Google AI Mode: any date for the EU; so far there is none.
• Copilot in Spanish: official confirmation of availability for Spain.
• Gemini app: no ads as of mid-2026; its executives have described themselves as open to the idea.