ChatGPT Ads in Sweden: what we know and what no one knows yet

Since ads arrived in Sweden in late August 2026, several clients have asked whether they should be advertising there. The honest answer is that it is too early to tell. The service is new, it changes every week, and there are no independent figures yet on how it performs in Sweden.

What we can do is establish how things actually work today and look at our own early figures. This overview draws on OpenAI's own help pages, advertising policy and press releases, as well as the campaigns we have run over the past month: one for Pigment and one for a client who is a tradesperson.

ChatGPT Ads is OpenAI's advertising platform. Ads appear below ChatGPT's answers, are labelled as sponsored and are kept separate from the answer itself.

An ad consists of the advertiser's name, logo, a headline, a short piece of copy, an image and a link to your website.

According to OpenAI, ads do not influence ChatGPT's answers, and advertisers do not get access to users' conversations.

Here is the timeline, based on OpenAI's own announcements:

• February 2026: the first ads are tested in the US.
• May 2026: the self-service Ads Manager launches in beta, and paying per click becomes an option.
• 19 August 2026: OpenAI announces that ads will arrive in 31 European countries, including Sweden, the following week. Initially, they are sold through OpenAI's sales team, agencies and technology partners.
• 26 August 2026: OpenAI says self-service is opening in Europe that day.
• 16 September 2026: OpenAI introduces a new ad format, Sponsored Agents, and integrations with HubSpot and Shopify.
• Late September 2026: Sweden changes from "coming soon" to available for self-service on OpenAI's own availability page.

In practice, though, it took a few extra weeks. On 24 September, OpenAI's own availability page still listed Sweden as "coming soon", four weeks after self-service was supposed to have opened. Since 28 September, Sweden has been listed as available for self-service on the same page.

In other words, treat dates in press releases as targets, not necessarily as a reflection of what is available for your account. Log in to ads.openai.com and check for yourself before making plans.

OpenAI says tens of thousands of advertisers have used the platform globally. It does not disclose how many are advertising in Sweden.

Not everyone who uses ChatGPT. This may be the most important limitation to understand.

Ads are only shown to users on the free version and the low-cost Go plan. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu are ad-free, and ads are not shown to accounts believed to belong to people under 18.

That matters for businesses selling to other businesses. People who use ChatGPT most at work often have a paid account or one provided by their employer, and you cannot reach them with ads.

This is where ChatGPT differs from Google.

In Google Ads, you choose keywords and bid on them. ChatGPT has no keywords in that sense. The ad is selected based on the conversation: what the user is asking, what they seem to want to achieve, and how well that matches the ad's headline, copy and landing page.

As an advertiser, you can add what are known as context hints: descriptions of the topics and situations your offering is relevant to. OpenAI explicitly states that these guide matching but do not work as exact keywords.

An example makes the difference clear. A Google search might be "bathroom renovation cost". A question to ChatGPT might be "how much does it cost to renovate an eight-square-metre bathroom in Stockholm, and how long does it take?". The second question tells you much more about what the person needs.

Whether that leads to better ads in practice is not yet clear. That is precisely where independent data is missing.

One point that rarely gets mentioned: personalised ads are not initially available in the EU, EEA or Switzerland.

In the US, ChatGPT can also use signals from a user's previous conversations when selecting an ad, if the user allows it. Here in Sweden, the ad is based on the current conversation. That limits how precise the system can be and makes it difficult to apply US results to the Swedish market.

Far from everything. According to OpenAI's advertising policy, the test period focuses primarily on consumer categories:

• lifestyle and household products
• local services
• travel and experiences
• digital products and education

Finance, healthcare and legal services are reviewed case by case and approved manually. Politics, gambling, alcohol, dating and health claims are not allowed.

So check that your sector is approved before spending time on a campaign. The policy itself says the list will change.

You pay either per thousand impressions or per click, and set a maximum bid. Ad placements are awarded through an auction that takes both bids and relevance into account. There are also campaigns that optimise for conversions, but these are still charged per click.

OpenAI recommends starting with a maximum bid of $3–5 per click. That is a starting bid to get you going, not a market rate. Clicks in our own campaigns have cost considerably less; more on that below.

The tools currently available for measurement include:

• a tracking pixel and a conversions API
• integrations with third-party measurement tools
• custom audiences
• country and platform selection
• product feeds for e-commerce

Reports show impressions, clicks, cost, click-through rate, average cost and conversions. That covers the basics, but not much more. If you are used to Google Ads or Meta, you will find far fewer tools for testing, audiences and performance analysis.

One practical tip applies regardless: add UTM parameters to every link so that traffic from ChatGPT appears separately in your own analytics. That way, you do not have to rely solely on the platform's own figures.

We have been running ChatGPT Ads for about a month, for ourselves and for a client offering trade services to private individuals. Both have also been advertising on Google Ads for similar searches, giving us something to compare against.

Before we get to the figures: the sample is small. We are talking about 159 clicks over one month, split between two advertisers. That is enough to spot a trend, not to draw conclusions.

That is clear straight away, and it applies to both campaigns.

• Pigment: just under SEK 18 per click in ChatGPT. In Google Ads, we have paid an average of SEK 66 for clicks on keywords such as "web agency" and "wordpress web agency".
• The tradesperson: SEK 27 per click in ChatGPT. In Google Ads, a click on searches such as "plumber stockholm" and "gas installer stockholm" costs an average of SEK 102, excluding searches for the company's own name.

In both cases, a click in ChatGPT costs roughly a quarter of what it costs in Google.

That is what you would expect from a new channel with few advertisers. Google has a mature auction environment where competitors have been bidding against each other for years. No one knows how long the price gap will last in ChatGPT.

The click-through rate is low. Both campaigns are just below one per cent. The ad appears beneath an answer that has already addressed the question, and it shows.

And most importantly: neither campaign has recorded a single conversion in ChatGPT Ads, whether an enquiry or a booking.

Conversion tracking is switched on in both accounts, so this is not a case of missing measurement.

In Google Ads, roughly one in ten clicks leads to an enquiry for the tradesperson. If the clicks from ChatGPT had behaved the same way, we would have expected about four. There were none.

Four expected versus zero is still a small sample, and a month is a short time. There may be explanations that do not show up in the figures: someone clicking from a ChatGPT answer might be earlier in their decision-making and return later through another channel, or the ad might appear in conversations where the question has already been answered. But those are guesses. What we know is that the clicks have come and the enquiries have not.

Cheap clicks are only cheap if they lead somewhere. That is the question we are trying to answer now.

Sponsored Agents has attracted the most attention. Instead of clicking through to a website, users can start a conversation with a company's own AI assistant directly in ChatGPT, ask questions and take the next step when they are ready.

It is an interesting direction. But it is important to be clear about the current situation: Sponsored Agents is being tested only in the US, with a small number of selected advertisers. OpenAI is not accepting applications to take part.

For Swedish businesses, then, it is something to watch, not something to plan for.

This list is at least as important as the rest of the article:

• How many people in Sweden see ads. OpenAI does not publish figures by country.
• What a click costs across the Swedish market. There are no public figures. Our own campaigns are at SEK 18–27, but that is two advertisers over one month.
• Whether clicks lead to business. No conversions have been recorded in our campaigns yet.
• What the competition looks like. Few advertisers can mean cheap clicks, but there are no statistics showing how many are already active here.
• How the ads perform. Published results come from OpenAI itself or its partners. That is supplier data, not independent measurement.
• What the service will look like in six months. New features have arrived roughly every fortnight since the spring.

Before writing this article, we asked ChatGPT to summarise the state of ChatGPT Ads in Sweden. The answer was well written, well structured and mostly correct. But when we checked it against OpenAI's own pages, three things did not add up:

• ChatGPT said self-service opened on 31 August and that Swedish businesses can buy ads directly today. OpenAI's own announcement says 26 August, and its availability page still lists Sweden as "coming soon".
• ChatGPT suggested legal services, insurance and business software as suitable sectors. According to the advertising policy, legal services and finance are restricted and subject to manual review.
• ChatGPT described Sponsored Agents without mentioning that it is only being tested in the US.

And the most important difference for Swedish advertisers, that personalised ads are not available in the EU, was not mentioned at all.

This is not a criticism of the tool. It is a reminder of why primary sources still matter, especially for something changing so quickly.

We would not move money from a successful Google Ads campaign to ChatGPT Ads today. Google and Meta have spent years developing measurement, audiences and automation that ChatGPT still lacks.

But we would not ignore the channel either. If you want to try it:

1. Check that you can advertise and are allowed to. Is Ads Manager available for your account, and is your sector approved?
2. Start small and keep it focused. Use a separate test budget that does not take money away from what already works.
3. Set up and test conversion tracking before you launch. Submit a test enquiry and check that it appears in Ads Manager. Otherwise, you will not know whether zero really means zero.
4. Choose an offering people need to think about before buying. That is where conversations get longer and questions become more specific, and where any difference from Google should show up first.
5. Measure results yourself. Use UTM parameters and your own conversion tracking so you can compare channels on equal terms.
6. Decide in advance what a good result looks like. Otherwise, it will be hard to tell whether the test succeeded.

ChatGPT Ads is the paid part of something bigger. The organic part is about being mentioned and cited in the answer itself, sometimes known as GEO.

The two are partly connected. Both start with the same thing: website content that clearly describes what you offer, who it is for and why. An ad leading to an unclear landing page is less likely to be matched well, and that same lack of clarity makes you less likely to be cited.

We have written more about the organic side in How to get noticed when a machine writes the answer.

We help you test the channel without putting what already works at risk.

Find out more about our paid search advertising work · Explore our AI solutions

All accessed and reviewed on 24 September 2026.

• ChatGPT Ads expands across Europe — OpenAI, 19 August 2026. Launch in 31 countries, Free and Go only.
• A milestone in expanding access to AI — OpenAI, 26 August 2026. Self-service in Europe, tens of thousands of advertisers, measurement features.
• Reimagining advertising with AI — OpenAI, September 2026. Sponsored Agents, HubSpot, Shopify.
• Ads Manager Availability — OpenAI Help Center. Sweden listed as "Coming Soon" on 24 September 2026.
• Ads in ChatGPT — OpenAI Help Center. Which plans show ads, personalisation in the EEA.
• Ads in ChatGPT: The Basics — OpenAI Help Center. Ad formats, auction, recommended bid, reports.
• Create Ad Groups for ChatGPT Ads — OpenAI Help Center. Context hints.
• Sponsored Agents in ChatGPT Ads — OpenAI Help Center. Limited alpha, no applications accepted.
• Ad policies — OpenAI. Permitted and prohibited sectors.
• Our own data: ChatGPT Ads and Google Ads for Pigment and a client offering trade services. Exports from Ads Manager and Google Ads, retrieved on 23–24 September 2026.