ChatGPT Ads Expands To 26 New Countries

OpenAI said on October 21, 2026, that ChatGPT Ads, the advertising format built into ChatGPT, is now available in 26 additional countries. The company framed the expansion around reach rather than a single new feature: local businesses and global brands can now put ads in front of people while those people are using ChatGPT to explore options, compare products and decide what to buy, rather than only after they leave the chat for a search engine or a retailer’s site.

Alongside the country expansion, OpenAI disclosed that more than 100,000 advertisers have used ChatGPT Ads since the format launched. That figure is the clearest public signal yet of how many businesses have actually bought into the format, as opposed to how many countries can technically access it. OpenAI’s own text, drawn from its news feed entry because the announcement page itself blocked automated reading, gives no breakdown by country, advertiser size or spend, so the figure should be read as a cumulative total of advertisers who have run at least one campaign, not as a current active count.

The numbers

• 26 new countries now have access to ChatGPT Ads, on top of wherever the format was already live.
• Over 100,000 advertisers have used the platform in total, spanning what OpenAI describes as local businesses and global brands.

Neither figure comes with a timeframe for when the count was taken or a list of which 26 countries were added, which limits how precisely an outside advertiser can judge momentum from this announcement alone. What is clear is the direction: OpenAI is treating ChatGPT’s shopping and comparison behavior as a distribution channel worth selling access to at increasing scale, rather than a feature it is still testing in a handful of markets.

For an advertiser or a marketing team, the practical question this raises is not whether to try ChatGPT Ads but when, and how it compares with established spend on search and social. A format with 100,000 advertisers already is no longer a small pilot, and a 26-country expansion suggests OpenAI expects demand to keep pace with that pace of rollout. Readers budgeting ad spend for the next planning cycle now have one more established channel to weigh against the ones they already use.