OpenAI on September 23, 2026 began rolling out ChatGPT Ads in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan, and opened self-service buying to businesses in all seven from the first day, 25 days after India went live with no self-service route at all.

In Short

OpenAI has started putting ads into ChatGPT in seven more places in Asia: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan. Local businesses can buy those ads themselves through an online dashboard straight away, and people using the free or low-cost Go versions of ChatGPT there will start to see them. The ad product now covers more than 60 countries, but almost no public data yet shows how the ads perform anywhere outside the US and the UK.

Seven markets in one post

The disclosure arrived, as several before it had, through a LinkedIn post from Benji Shomair, OpenAI's vice president of monetization. The copy reviewed by PPC Land was captured on September 24, 2026, about two hours after it went up. "Our global expansion continues: ChatGPT Ads are rolling out in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and Taiwan," the post reads. The next line carried the number: "With this launch, ChatGPT Ads are available in more than 60 countries!"

Shomair used the same channel for the United Kingdom activation on June 6, for Japan and South Korea on June 22 and for India on August 29. This time a newsroom post on OpenAI's website, dated September 23, 2026, accompanied the LinkedIn text. According to OpenAI, the seven markets follow earlier Asia Pacific activations in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea and India.

The regional pitch in the post is one sentence long. "For advertisers across Southeast Asia and Taiwan, this creates a new opportunity to reach people as they discover products, explore options, and make decisions," Shomair wrote. The buying routes take one more. "Advertisers can get started through our Ads Solutions team, agency and technology partners or self-service via Ads Manager," the post states.

The newsroom version names the agencies: dentsu, Havas Media, Omnicom Media, Publicis Groupe and WPP. That roster runs one name longer than the four holding companies PPC Land recorded when India went live, with Havas Media the addition. Dave Dugan, vice president and head of global ads solutions at OpenAI, described the Asian expansion as extending the opportunity to businesses of every size, from global brands looking for growth to startups running a first campaign, according to OpenAI.

Who sees the ads, and who does not

The subscription boundary is unchanged. "As in our other markets, ads are shown only to users on Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, and Enterprise subscriptions remain ad-free," according to the post. That list of exempt plans is shorter than earlier ones. When OpenAI confirmed its advertising plans on January 16, 2026, Business was also named as ad-free, alongside exclusions for accounts belonging to users under 18 and for conversations near sensitive topics such as health, mental health and politics. The notice OpenAI emailed to European users on August 15 added Education. Neither the LinkedIn post nor the newsroom post suggests any change for those plans; they simply go unmentioned.

The standard assurance follows. "Ads are clearly labeled, separate from ChatGPT's answers, and do not influence the responses ChatGPT provides," the post reads, in wording that has barely moved across activation posts since May. The final factual claim concerns scale: "Tens of thousands of businesses are already advertising on ChatGPT."

A one-day gap in the date

OpenAI's newsroom post carries a date of September 23. Marketing-Interactive, a Singapore-based trade publication, gave September 24 as the start date for the region. The difference is consistent with the time zones separating the US West Coast from Southeast Asia. OpenAI has not published local activation times, and neither source names a clock time.

Self-service from the first day

The most consequential detail is operational rather than geographic. OpenAI's help centre page on Ads Manager availability, which the newsroom post links from its 60-country figure, listed 63 countries when PPC Land retrieved it on September 24, carrying an update stamp from three hours earlier. All seven new markets were marked as available for self-service. So was every other country on the page.

Access depends on where the buyer is incorporated, not where the audience sits. According to OpenAI, the legal entitythat advertises and is billed must be based in a country marked as available. A regional hub registered in Singapore can therefore buy directly, as can a retailer registered in Vietnam. A company incorporated in a country missing from the list can sign up at ads.openai.com and wait to be notified. One section of the page still describes the managed route in terms of advertisers in the new European markets, wording written before the Asian additions.

India worked differently. Indian advertisers started on August 29 with ads running and no self-service door, and the United Kingdom had waited 16 days for the same access in June. OpenAI then opened self-service purchasing across India, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa on August 31. The pattern the seven Asian markets follow is the Latin American one: when Brazil and Mexico went live on August 17, all three buying routes were described as open at once.

The cost of entry has fallen steeply over the same period. The pilot began in the United States on February 9, 2026 at a $60 CPM with a $200,000 minimum commitment. The threshold fell to $50,000 in April, and it disappeared for US self-serve buyers on May 5, when OpenAI added cost-per-click bidding to a self-serve Ads Manager. What remains is a daily floor. A Minimum Campaign Spend table documented on August 21 listed floors in ten billing currencies, from 25 US dollars to 725 Indian rupees. No Indonesian, Malaysian, Philippine, Singaporean, Thai, Vietnamese or Taiwanese currency appeared in it at that point, and neither of the September 23 documents says which currencies the new markets bill in.

How the count reaches 63

The arithmetic deserves a closer look, because the two public figures do not meet. Brazil and Mexico took the publicly counted total to nine on August 17. Sponsored placements reached 31 European markets on August 24, and India on August 29 made 41. On August 31, OpenAI put ChatGPT Ads in more than 40 countries, according to PPC Land's report on that week's product update. Seven more would make 48. The post says more than 60.

The help centre list closes the gap. Beyond the 41 markets on the public record and the seven new ones, it names 15 others: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. OpenAI told advertisers at the end of August that placements were rolling out across select countries in the Middle East and North Africa, but it did not name them, and no activation post comparable to Shomair's has listed them since. The 60-country claim therefore rests on a self-service availability table. No public document records the date on which ads began serving in each of those 15 markets.

The pace is plain enough without them. Nine markets on August 17 became 63 listed countries on September 23, a span of 37 days. After the US start on February 9, 226 days before the Asian rollout, the pilot had needed roughly six months to add its first eight countries.

Shopee on one side, Google on the other

The newsroom post carries one advertiser statement, and it comes from a marketplace operator with a presence across the region. Peggy Zhu, executive director of brand and growth marketing at Shopee, described OpenAI as a strategic partner and said Shopee was extending a collaboration that followed the ChatGPT Ads debut in Brazil to Southeast Asia and Taiwan, according to OpenAI. Shopee runs marketplaces in each of the seven markets as well as in Brazil.

The same company sits on a rival roster. Google said on March 24, 2026 that eligible brands would soon be able to activate commerce audiences from Asian marketplaces including Shopee and PChome directly in Google Ads, without giving a date. PChome operates in Taiwan. A marketplace can thus supply audience data to Google's ad products while buying placements from OpenAI across the same region.

Google's answer-engine inventory also got there first in four of them. The company rolled out ads in AI Overviews to 11 additional countries on December 19, 2025, a list that included Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore, with text and Shopping ads from existing Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns eligible for those placements. For a regional search team, ChatGPT arrives as a second AI answer surface rather than the first.

The audience for the new units includes paying customers. Go, the tier that carries ads, cost SG$13 a month in Singapore when Marketing-Interactive reported its global rollout in January 2026. The same publication gave prices of 259 baht in Thailand and 132,000 dong in Vietnam, describing both as among ChatGPT's fastest-growing markets in Southeast Asia, with weekly active users in Vietnam tripling over the preceding year.

Language is the untested variable

Japan and South Korea were the first markets where the primary user language was not English, a point PPC Land flagged at the time because the platform's context-hint targeting matches advertiser-supplied phrases against conversational text. The seven new markets add Indonesian, Malay, Filipino, Thai, Vietnamese and Taiwan's Traditional Chinese script, alongside the multilingual mix of Singapore.

OpenAI has a tool aimed at that problem. On September 16, the company added an opt-in text customisation setting that adapts existing headlines and descriptions to the conversation and translates them into the user's preferred language. The same coverage recorded the constraints of the ad card itself: a headline of roughly 16 characters and a description of roughly 32. Neither September 23 document explains how those limits translate into Thai or Traditional Chinese script, where a character count does not correspond to English word length.

A second tool has a matching date. The ChatGPT Ads app for Shopify was due to become available internationally from September 23 in markets where ChatGPT Ads run, according to the same PPC Land report, and its store listing supported English only. Whether the seven markets activated that day fall inside the Shopify rollout is not stated in either post.

Measurement arrives without local benchmarks

The measurement plumbing is global in design. Web conversions reach OpenAI through a pixel and a Conversions API, both introduced on May 5. LiveRamp connected its Conversions API Hub on June 10. App measurement is narrower: AppsFlyer and Adjust went live in July as integrated partners for campaigns in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Japan and South Korea. None of the new Asian markets is on that list, and no extension has been published.

Attribution rules moved quickly in the weeks before the rollout. Reporting on view-through conversions arrived on August 19 with a window fixed at one day and no role in bidding or billing. Four weeks later, according to the September 16 advertiser email described in PPC Land's coverage, conversion optimisation with impression billing was generally available and attribution windows had become configurable, at 7, 14 or 30 days after a click and 0 or 1 day after a view. Automatic advanced matching, which uses hashed customer information collected from advertiser website forms, became the pixel default on August 17 in the markets where it operates. Neither Asian announcement says whether every one of those settings is available in the seven markets from the first day.

Independent data is thin and entirely Western. Similarweb put ChatGPT ad penetration at 26% of US desktop chats in June 2026, against 14% in May, with a 0.50% click-through rate. Adthena counted 7,378 distinct ChatGPT advertisers in the week of July 13 to 20, 60.1% of them in the United States. Shomair's "tens of thousands" of businesses, stated two months later, uses an undefined measure, so the two figures cannot be reconciled from public material. No comparable dataset exists for any of the seven new markets.

Privacy rules differ market by market

OpenAI's newsroom post restates its principles: conversations kept private from advertisers, no sale of customer data, and user control over ad personalization, with ad-free paid plans for people who prefer them. What it does not say is whether personalised advertising operates in the new markets at all.

That question has had different answers elsewhere. In Europe, OpenAI told users in August that ads would not be personalised at the outset, with selection drawing on the current conversation topic, general location and device type, and past chats and memories excluded. India entered the roster with its data protection rules published but their main obligations not due until around May 2027, as PPC Land noted at the time.

Two of the seven Asian markets carry fresh obligations of their own. Vietnam issued Decree 356/2025/ND-CP on December 31, 2025, effective the next day, setting consent mechanisms, cross-border transfer procedures and penalties for organisations processing Vietnamese personal data. Indonesia has published a 225-article implementing regulation for its 2022 data protection statute, with fines of up to 2% of revenue, applying from January 2027. Automatic advanced matching places the consent question at the advertiser's own web form rather than at OpenAI's interface, which leaves the compliance question with Indonesian and Vietnamese advertisers that keep the default.

Why this matters for the marketing community

For regional media buyers, the change is practical. Since September 23 an advertiser incorporated in any of the seven markets has been able to open an account and buy ChatGPT inventory without a sales conversation, a minimum commitment of the kind the US pilot imposed, or a partner relationship. That removes the gap between inventory and buying access that UK and Indian advertisers experienced. It does not remove the questions of currency, measurement and personalisation that neither announcement answers.

The expansion also confirms how far geography has outrun tooling. OpenAI moved from nine markets to 63 listed countries in 37 days, while the app attribution partners it names still cover seven countries and independent benchmarks cover two. Amazon's pilot extending Amazon DSP campaigns into ChatGPT runs only in the United States, and Adform's technology partnership covers the European rollout. Whether Criteo, StackAdapt, Kargo, Adobe and Pacvue can route budgets into the seven new markets is not stated in either announcement.

The commercial logic is visible in the revenue figures. Digiday reported on August 31 that the business had reached a $1 billion annualised run rate in under 200 days, a figure derived from roughly $83 million of monthly revenue, and Sensor Tower found ads shown per user per hour on the US mobile app up 163% between April and August. A run rate is a projection from one month rather than booked annual revenue. Each market with a Free and Go user base adds inventory behind that projection without any increase in US ad load.

Competition shapes the regional picture more than in earlier waves. Google's AI Overviews ads have run in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore for nine months, and Shopee now appears both in OpenAI's announcement and on Google's commerce audience list. Advertisers in those four markets face two AI answer surfaces with little independent data on either. OpenAI said it will expand to more markets, add formats and build optimisation and measurement tools over the coming months. Which arrives first in Southeast Asia: more countries, or the numbers that would show what the existing seven return?

Timeline

Summary

Who: OpenAI, through Benji Shomair, its vice president of monetization, on LinkedIn and through a newsroom post quoting Dave Dugan, head of global ads solutions, and Shopee's Peggy Zhu. The change affects advertisers and agencies in seven Asian markets and ChatGPT users there on the Free and Go plans.

What: ChatGPT Ads began rolling out in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan, with buying available through OpenAI's Ads Solutions team, agency partners including dentsu, Havas Media, Omnicom Media, Publicis Groupe and WPP, technology partners, and self-service Ads Manager from the first day. OpenAI states the product is now available in more than 60 countries; its help centre lists 63, including 15 Middle Eastern, North African and Turkish markets with no published activation dates.

When: OpenAI dated its announcement September 23, 2026; a regional trade publication gave September 24 as the start date. Shomair's post and the 63-country help page were captured on September 24, 2026.

Where: Seven markets across Southeast Asia and Taiwan, eligible for self-service only when the advertising legal entity is based in a listed country.

Why: According to OpenAI, ads fund free and low-cost access to ChatGPT and reach people while they explore options and make decisions. The business passed a $1 billion annualised run rate in under 200 days, and each new market adds Free and Go users to the inventory pool, while measurement partners, local benchmarks and personalisation rules for the new region remain unpublished.