OpenAI said on Wednesday that it is expanding advertising on ChatGPT to 26 more countries, including Pakistan, bringing the total to 89, as the company builds up its advertising business to boost revenue ahead of a potential initial public offering (IPO), according to Reuters. The latest expansion adds 14 more Latin American countries, including Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Peru, following earlier launches in Mexico and Brazil. Ads are also launching in markets across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, including Nigeria, South Africa, Serbia, Ukraine, Cambodia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. The mix of markets shows how widely OpenAI is spreading its advertising rollout, with emerging economies placed alongside larger and more established digital advertising markets in a single expansion.
In the new markets, advertisers can reach ChatGPT users through technology partners or get self-service access through Ads Manager on OpenAI’s platform. This gives businesses of different sizes more than one route into the platform, whether through a partner or on their own. Ads Manager was first opened in the US in May, allowing businesses to set budgets and bids, launch campaigns, and track performance from a single portal. The ads will appear only on ChatGPT’s Free and Go plans, while Plus, Pro, and Enterprise subscriptions will remain ad-free, which means users who pay for a higher tier will not see any change to their experience. OpenAI has previously said that ads are clearly labelled and kept separate from the answers the chatbot gives, and that advertisers do not get access to users’ private conversations.
The move comes as advertising becomes a larger part of OpenAI’s revenue strategy. The company said in August that its ads business had reached an annualised revenue run rate of $1 billion, and it began testing ads in ChatGPT in the United States earlier this year. More than 100,000 advertisers have since run campaigns on the platform, according to OpenAI. In September, the company introduced AI-powered tools for advertisers and began testing business-sponsored agents with select advertisers in the US. Together, these steps show how quickly the company is building out the tools, partners, and formats needed to turn a large user base into a sustained advertising business ahead of a potential public listing, and the latest country expansion adds a much wider geographic footprint to that effort.
For Pakistan, the expansion arrives in a market where ChatGPT already draws heavy traffic. A recent TechJuice report based on Semrush data ranked ChatGPT as the country’s third most visited website, with 65.36 million monthly visits. That level of usage makes the platform an obvious candidate for advertisers looking to reach people who are researching products, comparing options, or planning purchases through a chatbot instead of a search engine. The Reuters report does not say when ads will begin appearing for users in Pakistan, what pricing advertisers will face, or which ad formats will be available locally, so Pakistani brands and agencies will need to look to OpenAI and its technology partners for those details, since the announcement itself focuses on the global rollout rather than country-level specifics.
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