Barely a week after the ads went live for French users (August 24, 2026), OpenAI took a second step forward: the self-service Ads Manager is now accessible directly from France, as well as in 30 other European markets, India, the Middle East, and North Africa. In our August 28 article, we wrote that this expanded access was «scheduled for later in the quarter,» but the rollout actually happened much sooner. Here’s what has changed—and what that means in practice for businesses looking to use it.
No more minimum budget
The most significant change does not concern access itself, but rather the cost of entry. When the U.S. pilot was launched, OpenAI required a minimum budget of $200,000 to open an advertiser account—a threshold reserved for the largest brands. That amount was lowered to $50,000 in the spring and then eliminated entirely. Any company can now open an account at ads.openai.com, with no minimum requirement.
However, opening an account is subject to a few conditions: verification of the company’s identity and business activity, adding a payment method, belonging to an eligible product or service category, and ensuring that ad creatives comply with OpenAI’s policy. We detail these points, category by category, in our Complete Guide to ChatGPT Ads.
A sign of growth, with one caveat to keep in mind
OpenAI reported a remarkable figure: $1 billion in annualized advertising revenue in less than 200 days, generated by tens of thousands of advertisers around the world. This figure should be interpreted with the caveat that OpenAI itself provided: this is revenue extrapolated from the current pace, not revenue realized over a full year. The trend remains clear—advertisers’ interest is there—but it does not yet prove sustained performance over time.
In France, several agencies already have campaigns underway or in the works: Cosmo5 is running campaigns for Carrefour, Bouygues Télécom, and Cultura (about 15 brands in total), Havas Market launched a campaign for EDF on August 26, and Gamned! (part of the Biggie Group) is running six test campaigns. This confirms that the channel has moved from the announcement stage to the execution stage—even though no reliable performance benchmarks (CTR, CPA, ROAS) are yet publicly available for the French market.
How This Affects Your Strategy
Launching the self-service option doesn’t make advance preparation any less necessary—it simply makes it available sooner. Structuring your content and product feed, setting up tracking (Pixel, Conversions API), and authorizing OpenAI bots (OAI-AdsBot, OAI-SearchBot) in your robots.txt file remain technical prerequisites that must be addressed before spending a single euro—we detail them in our guide.
What has changed, however, is that there is no longer a waiting period to overcome: the question is no longer «when will we be able to go there,» but «are we ready to go there properly?».
