Who Is Advertising on ChatGPT: Every Confirmed Advertiser, Tracked

OpenAI started showing ads in ChatGPT in February 2026 as an invitation-only pilot with large brands and their agencies. Eight months later the company says more than 100,000 advertisers have run campaigns, and on October 21 it extended ads to 89 countries. Small businesses buying through OpenAI's self-serve Ads Manager now make up a large share of that total, while the big brands tend to arrive through agency holding companies and ad tech partners.

Our analysts built a tracker of every advertiser that a company, an agency, OpenAI or a credible trade publication has publicly confirmed as running ads on ChatGPT, from the February 9, 2026 pilot through October 22, 2026. Each brand was checked against the press release, case study or article that confirmed it and classified by category, market, first reported date and the route it took onto the platform. The tracker holds 63 confirmed advertisers in eight countries, 26 of them in the US. Financial services and insurance is the largest category, with 8 brands, and none of them is in the US.

In the following sections, we show how the advertiser count has grown, list every confirmed big-brand advertiser in the US and abroad, break the list down by category and by how each brand got onto ChatGPT, collect public accounts from smaller businesses that advertise there, and set our tracker beside the industry shares that third-party ad libraries have recorded.

How Many Advertisers Are on ChatGPT

OpenAI does not publish a running list of advertisers, so the count comes from occasional company statements and analyst estimates. Each figure below is as its source reported it.

• The count rose from more than 600 advertisers in late March, when ads ran only in the US, to more than 100,000 by October 21. OpenAI's October figure counts every advertiser that has run a campaign since launch, so it is a cumulative total rather than the number active on any one day.
• New Street Research estimated about 20,000 advertisers at the end of August and about 60,000 in early October, a threefold rise in roughly five weeks. That jump followed the launch of ads in 31 European countries on August 24 and in India on August 27, both with self-serve access soon after.
• OpenAI said on August 31 that small and medium businesses had been a material share of its advertisers since Ads Manager opened in May. The agency pilots that brought in the big brands involved a few dozen clients each, so most of the growth to six figures came through self-serve buying and ad tech partners.

Big Brands Advertising on ChatGPT in the US

The tracker lists 26 US advertisers. 16 of them were confirmed in February, during the invitation-only pilot, and the rest came mostly from OpenAI's customer stories, its September announcement of Sponsored Agents, an ad format that opens a conversation with the advertiser's own AI agent, and Amazon Ads' pilot. The last column shows how many of each brand's ads appeared in GPT Ad Library's US capture of October 3 and 4, 2026, a third-party observation explained below.

• Retail, grocery and big consumer brands dominated the February pilot: Target, Albertsons, Kroger, Williams-Sonoma and the WPP Media clients Ford, Mazda, Audible, Mrs. Meyer's Clean Day and Audemars Piguet. Omnicom said it had placed more than 30 clients in the pilot without disclosing who they were.
• The brands confirmed since August lean toward software, home services and online retail, such as Jotform, LegalNature, Stream, Angi, Wayfair, Lowe's and VistaPrint. All 9 of those confirmed by OpenAI after the pilot came from its own customer stories or its September advertiser list.
• 13 of the 26 US brands appeared in GPT Ad Library's October capture. Jotform, Expedia, VistaPrint and Angi each had more than 1,000 ads shown, while several February pilot brands, including Ford, Kroger and Albertsons, did not appear, which suggests their pilot campaigns had ended or did not match the questions in that capture. Williams-Sonoma's own site did not appear, but its Pottery Barn brand did, with 183 ads.

Brands Advertising on ChatGPT Outside the US

Outside the US, 37 advertisers have been confirmed across 7 countries, plus Foot Locker Asia Pacific and HP's global ecommerce team. Most were announced by the agencies and ad tech companies that OpenAI appointed as launch partners in each region.

• India has the most confirmed advertisers outside the US, with 14. Mamaearth, through Criteo, was the first Indian brand to advertise, and the payments company Razorpay signed an agreement covering nine brands, including Tanishq, Fastrack and Tata Neu.
• Europe's first wave came through agencies. Cosmo5 said 10 of its clients in France and Spain would launch campaigns in the week of the August 24 launch and identified seven of them, and WPP Media's German pilot clients, Colgate-Palmolive, Ford, Henkel, RTL and the Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken, have run campaigns since late August.
• Financial brands are far more common abroad. Banks and insurers such as Hiscox, PayPay Card, SOMPO Direct, Santalucía, IndusInd Bank and Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken all advertise outside the US. Our tracker found no US bank or insurer that has announced a ChatGPT campaign, although Capital One, GEICO and New York Life appeared in the third-party capture covered below.

ChatGPT Advertisers by Category

This section groups the 63 confirmed advertisers into 18 categories. Each brand is counted once, in its main line of business.

• Financial services and insurance leads with 8 advertisers, or 12.7% of the tracker, all outside the US. Grocery and meal kits, travel and hospitality, and business software and services follow with 5 each.
• In the US, business software and services has the most brands, with 5, followed by home and home improvement with 4. The US list has no financial, telecom or energy brand.
• The pattern matches what the agencies said they were bringing in. WPP Media listed automotive, packaged goods, entertainment, gaming, luxury, retail, technology and travel for its US pilot, and Omnicom listed apparel, automotive, beauty, packaged goods, hospitality, retail, restaurants, technology and telecom.

How Advertisers Got Onto ChatGPT: Agencies, Ad Tech Partners and Ads Manager

Big brands reached ChatGPT through three doors: the agency holding companies OpenAI chose as launch partners, ad tech platforms connected to OpenAI's ad system, and direct relationships that OpenAI then publicized. The table counts the confirmed advertisers by the route through which they were first confirmed.

• Agencies announced 20 of the 63 brands, more than any other route: WPP Media (9), Cosmo5 (7) and Dentsu (4). Dentsu, Omnicom, Publicis and WPP were OpenAI's first agency partners, and Havas and MediaPlus joined them for the European launch.
• Ad tech partners brought in 12 brands, mostly outside the US. Criteo, the first ad tech partner, said more than 2,000 brands were advertising through it by June, and Adobe, Kargo, Pacvue, StackAdapt, Amazon Ads, HubSpot and Shopify have since connected their own tools to ChatGPT ads.
• Self-serve buying explains the gap between the confirmed list and the six-figure total. OpenAI began rolling out its beta Ads Manager to US businesses on May 5, then opened it in Europe, India and Southeast Asia, and businesses that buy there rarely announce it.

Small Businesses Advertising on ChatGPT

Small businesses make up most of ChatGPT's advertisers but rarely appear in press releases. OpenAI said in August that small and medium businesses were a material share of its advertisers, and Australian media buyers told AdNews in April that about 80% of advertiser interest was reportedly coming from small and midsized businesses. The table lists smaller companies that have said in public that they run ChatGPT ads.

• 5 of the 12 businesses are in the US, and most of the list is service firms: a coaching firm, a law firm, an auto glass shop and several marketing agencies. Many of them wrote up their tests to show clients what the channel is like.
• Several bought through partners rather than OpenAI directly. IndoorMedia and Five Stars Auto Glass used StackAdapt, and the New York law firm's campaigns were run by the agency Totem.
• OpenAI's own customer stories add a few more smaller software companies to the list, including LegalNature, Jotform, Stream and the language app Talkpal, all of which appear in the US table above.

ChatGPT Advertisers by Industry in Third-Party Ad Libraries

Independent ad libraries record the ads that appear in ChatGPT conversations, which gives a rough view of the advertiser base by industry. The largest, GPT Ad Library, ran 123,613 US conversations on October 3 and 4, 2026 across 20 industries and recorded 118,765 ads from 5,750 advertisers. Each ad appeared after a follow-up message asking for a sponsored ad, so these are third-party observations of who advertised, not a measure of how often ChatGPT shows ads, and the industries are the library's own labels for the questions it wrote.

• Local home services had the most advertisers, 767, followed by media and entertainment (733) and small business tools (729). Each industry received a similar number of conversations, so the spread reflects how many companies bid on those topics.
• The library saw 2,459 advertisers, or 42.8%, in two or more industries, so the industry counts add up to more than 5,750. Telecom, beauty, personal finance and food delivery had the fewest advertisers, though a few large ones such as Lyca Mobile, NerdWallet and Hungryroot appeared often.
• The two views differ because they measure different groups. Our tracker covers brands that announced their campaigns, while the library catches the long tail of US advertisers that never issue a press release.

The library also ranks advertisers by how many of their ads were shown. The table lists the 25 most shown.

• The top 10 advertisers accounted for 13.9% of the ads shown, the next 90 for 28.1%, and the other 5,650 advertisers for 57.4%. 1,642 advertisers, or 28.6%, appeared in only one conversation.
• Large brands sit further down the ranking. Nike, The Home Depot, Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, BMW USA, Capital One and AT&T Mobility all appeared in the library's top 100, each with fewer than 420 ads shown.
• A second library, ChatGPT Ad Library, counted 2,655 advertisers across 108 niches in July 2026, led by enterprise and fintech, software and productivity, and real estate, and now reports more than 11,000 advertisers observed. Its niche labels are different from GPT Ad Library's, so the two cannot be combined.

What the ChatGPT Advertiser Base Looks Like Heading Into 2027

ChatGPT's advertiser base now has two layers. A few dozen confirmed big brands, mostly retailers, packaged goods makers, travel companies and, outside the US, banks and insurers, came in through agency pilots and still supply most of the public announcements. Beneath them sit tens of thousands of smaller advertisers buying through Ads Manager, visible mainly in third-party captures and in their own blog posts.

The 2026 holiday season will test whether the big brands stay. Several February pilot brands did not appear in October's third-party capture, while online retailers, software companies and home service marketplaces dominated it. OpenAI has added visual ads in image generation and Sponsored Agents in the US, formats aimed at the kinds of retailers and service marketplaces that already lead the US list.

So if the count keeps growing at the pace of August to October, the next official figure will be dominated even more by small businesses, and the confirmed big-brand list will keep growing mainly as OpenAI enters new countries with agency partners.