OpenAI Sets Ad Credit Rules as ChatGPT Ad Load Doubles
Six months into its ad business, OpenAI has quietly published the fine print on how brands can apply ad credits, even as its ad load per user more than doubles.
Key takeaways
- OpenAI's newly published ad credit policy sets a 90-day expiration and bars stacking credits with other discounts.
- OpenAI can apply credits only to undefined 'eligible fees' and reserves the right to suspend, revoke or void them at its discretion.
- Ads per user per hour on OpenAI's platform more than doubled between April and late July, per Sensor Tower data cited by Marketing Brew.
- OpenAI is separately testing a chat-based ad format that replaces click-outs with a brand agent living inside the conversation.
- Marketers extending AI ad budgets should read credit terms line by line before treating them as guaranteed discounts.
What OpenAI Published
OpenAI has finally spelled out how brands can apply ad credit to campaigns, six months after launching its advertising business, according to the AdExchanger Daily News Roundup. The policy never mentions ChatGPT by name, but the intent is unmistakable: it governs how marketers spend down the credits OpenAI hands out to court early ad demand.
The terms are tighter than the pitch suggests. Credits expire after 90 days, cannot be combined with other discounts, and OpenAI reserves the right to apply them only to 'eligible fees,' a term the policy leaves undefined. OpenAI also retains discretion to suspend, revoke or void credits at any time.
Why It Matters Now
Increase in OpenAI ads per user per hour, April to late July 2026
Sensor Tower, via Marketing Brew
OpenAI needs advertiser confidence, not just credit terms, to sustain that growth. Last month it posted engineering job listings focused on 'ad formats,' signaling it plans to expand beyond the ad manager it launched for ChatGPT in March.
It's also testing a format, first flagged by ecommerce analyst Juozas Kaziukėnas and reported by Search Engine Land, that scraps the click-to-website model entirely. Clicking an ad opens a chat-within-a-chat with a custom brand agent built from a company's crawled sites, reviews, product feeds and support pages, echoing the shift covered in our playbook on Google's agentic ad stack. As Search Engine Land put it, the conversation becomes the destination, not the website.
That shift complicates attribution just as agencies grapple with who eats rising AI token costs. Ebiquity CEO Ruben Schreurs told Digiday that agencies carried those costs on their own balance sheets for two years but 'can't afford to continue to subsidize all those costs' starting this year. Marketers should revisit their attribution models before locking in 2026 budgets built around click-out assumptions that this new ad format may not support.
Track how AI ad platforms are reshaping marketing budgets.
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