OpenAI began showing ads inside ChatGPT to users in India on August 27, marking one of the company’s biggest steps yet toward turning its free and low-cost tiers into an actual revenue source. India is one of ChatGPT’s largest markets by user count, with OpenAI disclosing back in February that the country accounts for more than 100 million weekly active users, so the rollout touches a meaningful share of the app’s global audience.
The ads are limited to two groups: people using ChatGPT’s free tier, and subscribers on the ₹399 (about $4) per month Go plan, OpenAI’s cheapest paid tier. Anyone paying for Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, or Education tiers won’t see ads at all. OpenAI says it’s starting the India rollout with around 50 brands, working with agency partners WPP and Omnicom to handle strategy, creative, measurement, and brand safety. A self-serve ad manager is set to open on September 4, letting marketers set up and run their own campaigns with a minimum daily budget of about ₹725 (roughly $7.60).
On format, OpenAI has been fairly specific: ads will appear below a ChatGPT response rather than mixed into it, will carry a clear label identifying them as sponsored, and will look visually distinct from the assistant’s actual answer. The company has also said that ads won’t influence what ChatGPT tells you — the response you get is generated the same way regardless of what’s being advertised nearby. On privacy, OpenAI says advertisers don’t get access to users’ chat histories, saved memories, or personal details, and that campaign reporting is limited to aggregate numbers like impressions and clicks rather than anything tied to individual conversations. Ads are also excluded from any account identified or predicted to belong to someone under 18, and from sensitive topics including politics, health, and mental health.
India has been getting unusually intense attention from OpenAI for over a year now. The company launched its sub-$5 Go plan there first, back in August 2025, before expanding it worldwide, and even ran a promotion making that tier free in India for a full year. OpenAI has also poured marketing money into cricket, sponsoring both the Indian Premier League and the Women’s Premier League, and hired Uber’s former India head to run its expansion in the country.
The bigger picture here is financial pressure. OpenAI is reportedly preparing for a public listing as early as 2027, after confidentially filing paperwork back in June, and its numbers show why monetizing free users matters: revenue reportedly hit $6.7 billion in the most recent quarter, up from $5.7 billion previously, but the company’s operating loss widened at the same time, from $9.3 billion to $12.3 billion. Advertising, even at modest rates, helps offset some of the computing cost of serving free users who aren’t paying anything at all. It’s also a notable reversal — OpenAI’s CEO once described putting ads inside ChatGPT as something to avoid if at all possible, back when the company was earlier in weighing how to expand its revenue beyond subscriptions.
For now, ads have already rolled out to 38 countries total, including the US, UK, Japan, South Korea, and much of Europe, so India joins a rollout that’s already well underway elsewhere — this is a scaling step rather than a first experiment.