ChatGPT to start showing ads across Europe next week

Europe Becomes the Largest Frontline for ChatGPT Advertising

Usagevpn.com – From 24 August, tens of millions of European users opening ChatGPT will encounter something they have never seen before: commercial advertisements embedded within their conversations with OpenAI’s chatbot. The expansion marks the company’s most ambitious advertising push to date, extending its ad programme across 31 European nations and bringing the cumulative total of markets where ChatGPT Ads operate to 40. For marketers, the timing is significant — Europe represents the single largest user base the platform has yet monetised through advertising.

How the Rollout Works

The advertising programme will appear exclusively on ChatGPT’s Free tier and its Go plan, the two lowest-cost subscription levels. Users paying for Plus, Pro, or Enterprise access will continue to experience an ad-free interface. OpenAI first piloted in-conversation ads in the United States back in February of this year, then progressively widened the programme through the calendar year to reach audiences in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and South Korea. The European expansion completes what the company describes as its global advertising footprint.

In a statement accompanying the announcement, OpenAI framed the move as offering European advertisers

“a new way to reach people while they are actively exploring, comparing, and making decisions.”

The company emphasised that user trust remains central to its advertising philosophy. It stated that it keeps

“conversations private from advertisers and never sell[s] customer data.”

The statement added that

“Ads in ChatGPT are always clearly labelled and separate from ChatGPT’s answers, and advertising does not influence the answers ChatGPT provides.”

A History of Pushback

Those assurances arrive against a backdrop of sustained criticism that has accompanied the ad programme since its initial announcement. In January 2026, US Senator Ed Markey sent a letter to Sam Altman alongside six other technology chief executives, warning that advertising embedded in AI chatbots carried the risk of exploiting the emotional intimacy users develop with conversational systems. Markey specifically pressed OpenAI on how it would prevent ads from targeting conversations touching on health, mental well-being, or political views.

When ads first surfaced in American conversations in February, a separate wave of user frustration emerged around their placement on the paid Go tier, priced at $8 per month. Many subscribers argued that paying for a service should logically mean an ad-free experience rather than merely a reduced volume of advertisements. In response to such complaints, OpenAI has made it possible for users to adjust ad personalisation settings, and anyone preferring complete ad removal can upgrade to the higher-priced plans.

The EU Regulatory Question

The European rollout lands squarely within the jurisdiction of two major EU legislative frameworks, each raising distinct questions about how conversational advertising should be governed.

Under the EU AI Act — legislation partly designed to answer precisely the question this rollout poses — personalised persuasion that crosses into manipulation is prohibited. The Act bans AI systems that deploy subliminal techniques, deliberately manipulative methods, or exploitation of individual vulnerabilities where such practices cause significant harm. Researchers and consumer-protection organisations have noted that conversational AI presents an especially difficult test case for that rule. An advertisement inserted into a personalised, trusted dialogue is far harder to identify as persuasion than a banner ad or a sponsored search result, precisely because it arrives wrapped in the same conversational register as the advice flanking it.

Chatbot advertising has not yet been subjected to full regulatory adjudication or court scrutiny, meaning the boundaries remain largely theoretical until enforcement actions or litigation clarify them.

The Digital Services Act Dimension

A parallel regulatory question operates under the Digital Services Act rather than the AI Act. The European Commission is currently assessing whether ChatGPT’s search functionality should be classified as a very large online search engine — a designation that triggers automatically once a service surpasses 45 million monthly users within the EU. Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier told Reuters in July that such a classification was

“definitely possible”

and could arrive

“sooner or later.”

That label would impose substantially heavier obligations on the platform: mandatory annual risk assessments, independent external audits, a publicly accessible advertising repository, and tighter data-sharing requirements with national regulators. For a service already operating at massive scale across the continent, the prospect of such scrutiny adds a layer of compliance complexity that European competitors and smaller chatbot providers do not yet face.

What Users Should Expect

For the average European ChatGPT user on a free or Go subscription, the practical change beginning Monday is straightforward: advertisements will appear within conversation threads, clearly marked as such and visually distinct from the assistant’s responses. Users retain the ability to tune personalisation preferences or eliminate ads entirely by upgrading their plan. The broader question — whether a commercial message delivered inside a trusted, personalised dialogue constitutes a fundamentally different form of persuasion from traditional advertising — remains one that regulators, courts, and consumer advocates will be working through over the coming months.