ChatGPT ads now run in 89 countries, including the UAE: what the expansion and the late-October creative change mean for your visibility

What changed: ChatGPT ads expand to 26 new countries

On 21 October 2026 OpenAI announced that ChatGPT Ads is expanding to 26 additional countries, "extending availability to 89 countries worldwide". The new markets include 14 more Latin American countries, among them Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru, and markets across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, including Nigeria, South Africa, Serbia, Ukraine, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Advertisers in these countries can buy through technology partners or self-serve in Ads Manager.

The same post gives two headline numbers: more than 1.2 billion people use ChatGPT each week, and over 100,000 advertisers have run campaigns since ads launched. Reuters, reporting the expansion, framed it as OpenAI building up its advertising business ahead of a potential stock market listing. Ads appear only on the Free and Go plans; Plus, Pro and Enterprise stay ad-free.

For businesses in the Gulf this is not a future story. OpenAI’s Ads Manager availability page, checked on 26 October 2026, lists 89 countries where self-service is available, including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Morocco, Pakistan and Turkey. The legal entity that advertises and is billed must be based in a listed country. Self-serve access across the Middle East and North Africa opened on 31 August, according to OpenAI’s announcement that day.

Do ChatGPT ads affect which brands ChatGPT recommends?

According to OpenAI, no. Its January 2026 principles say: "Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you." The 21 October post repeats that ads are "clearly labeled and separate from ChatGPT’s answers", and the creative enhancements help page answers the same question with a flat "No". We have no independent way to audit that claim, and nobody outside OpenAI has published a controlled test of it, so treat it as OpenAI’s stated policy rather than a proven fact.

The practical consequence is the important bit. If ads and answers are separate systems, then buying ChatGPT ads does not buy a citation or a recommendation in the answer itself. The two are earned differently:

OpenAI’s crawler documentation makes the split concrete. Sites that block OAI-SearchBot "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers". OAI-AdsBot "only visits pages submitted as ads", checks them against policy, and OpenAI "may also use content from the landing page to determine when it’s most relevant to show the ad". In other words, your landing page now does two jobs: it qualifies the ad, and it shapes when the ad is shown.

ChatGPT ads creative enhancements: what OpenAI can now change in your ads

The more urgent change for anyone already advertising is not the 26 countries. On 20 October OpenAI emailed advertisers that it would switch on creative enhancements for new and existing self-serve campaigns, as Barry Schwartz reported on Search Engine Roundtable. The help page says enhancements draw on the conversation or user interests, your existing ad and your landing page, and "can run automatically without requiring you to review or approve each version". The page also says there is no preview of every variation.

Anthony Higman, whose post Mackey was replying to, was blunter on X, arguing that when an ad platform frames a default as less work for advertisers, it usually means ads will show on queries the advertiser does not want, and saying he was switching his campaigns off. Not everyone reacts that way: early advertisers such as L’Oréal are publicly enthusiastic, as OpenAI’s own post shows.

How well do ChatGPT ads perform? The only market-level data so far

OpenAI has published case examples (on 31 August it cited one ecommerce advertiser achieving 3x return on ad spend over 28 days) but no platform-wide benchmarks. The most detailed outside view is The State of ChatGPT Ads, a report by the growth agency Graphite built on Similarweb panel data and published on 29 September 2026. It covers the nine markets that were live at the time, so it says nothing yet about the Gulf.

Two cautions. First, these are panel estimates, not OpenAI ad-server data. Second, a click-through rate tells you nothing about lead quality, which is exactly what practitioners such as Mackey are questioning. The report itself, as PPC Land summarised it, concluded that brands are "still in experimentation mode". That matches what we found when we looked at AI referral traffic against Google organic: the AI channel is real, small and hard to measure.

Can my business advertise on ChatGPT in the UAE or Saudi Arabia?

Probably, but check your category first. OpenAI’s ad policies (updated 10 September 2026) are stricter outside the US, and several of the Gulf’s biggest advertising sectors are currently out of bounds.

Separately from what you sell, OpenAI blocks ads next to whole types of conversation, including political content, mental and personal health, and other sensitive contexts. So even an eligible advertiser will not appear in every relevant chat.

What to do now: a checklist for organic visibility and ChatGPT ads

1. Decide on creative enhancements before 29 October. If you run self-serve campaigns, open Ads Manager, select Manage settings and choose deliberately. If you keep them on, check reporting at ad level every week.
2. Audit the pages an ad could land on. Because OpenAI may "optimise" destination URLs to other pages on your site, make sure out-of-date offers, thin pages and pages in the wrong language are removed, redirected or clearly marked.
3. Allow both crawlers. Confirm that robots.txt, your CDN and any bot-protection rules allow OAI-SearchBot (for organic answers) and OAI-AdsBot (for ad review). OpenAI publishes the IP ranges for both. A technical SEO audit catches blocks that firewalls add silently.
4. Keep landing pages factual and current. Prices, availability and promotions on the page become the raw material for rewritten ads and for organic answers. Specific, well-structured pages serve both.
5. Do not swap organic work for ad spend. Ads reach only Free and Go users and do not change the answer. Earning the mention in the answer is still the job of answer engine optimisation and content that ChatGPT can cite.
6. Check your category before you brief a campaign. Financial, health and legal services outside the US are generally barred, and property ads cannot reference a specific listing.
7. Test small, measure leads, not clicks. Track ChatGPT ad traffic with UTMs and conversions, compare lead quality with your other channels, and report it alongside organic AI visibility in one place. See how we approach reporting.

How to measure ChatGPT visibility when there are ads beside it

Keep the two channels in separate columns. For ads, Ads Manager reports impressions, clicks, spend, click-through rate and attributed conversions at campaign, ad group and ad level, and OpenAI’s help page warns that changes over time "do not, on their own, establish the effect of creative enhancements". For organic, track a fixed set of buyer prompts in ChatGPT, note whether you are mentioned and cited, and watch ChatGPT referrals in analytics. If ads go live and organic referrals fall, that is a signal worth investigating, not proof that one caused the other.

This week’s change makes one thing clearer than before: ChatGPT is becoming a paid channel as well as an answer engine, and the two reward different work. If you want help separating them, our SEO and AEO teams start with an audit of how ChatGPT already describes your brand.