OpenAI Ads Launches in Sweden — What to Expect

On 24 August 2026, OpenAI started serving ads in ChatGPT in Sweden. Sweden is part of an expansion into 31 European markets — by OpenAI's own description their largest geographic advertising expansion to date, six months after the first tests began in the US.

We have been in conversation with OpenAI about what this means in practice. Here is what we know about format, pricing and targeting — and what you can actually do today.

What launched, and where

Ads went live simultaneously across 31 European countries: all 27 EU member states plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. That is a regulatory perimeter — the EEA plus Switzerland — rather than a list ranked by market size. Together with the nine markets that already had ads (the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Mexico and New Zealand) plus India, the platform now supports 41 countries.

The most important thing to understand up front: ads are shown only to users on ChatGPT's Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro and Enterprise remain ad-free. So your addressable audience on the platform is not "every ChatGPT user in Sweden" but the subset who do not pay for Plus or above.

For B2B marketers that is a meaningful caveat. The professional users with the most buying power are also the most likely to hold a paid subscription — and you cannot reach them with ads. You can still reach them organically, through GEO.

What the ad looks like

The format is deliberately restrained. The ad appears below the model response, never inside it. It is clearly labelled "Sponsored" with a clickable favicon, and OpenAI is explicit that advertising does not influence what ChatGPT answers — advertisers also do not receive user conversations.

You supply three things: a headline, a description and a square image.

Element	Hard limit	OpenAI's recommendation
Headline	24 characters	Aim for 16 characters
Description	48 characters	Aim for 32 characters
Image	1:1, 640×640–1200×1200, PNG/JPG	Avoid the logo as the primary visual

The 16 and 32 character targets exist so nothing truncates in narrow mobile renders. That is tight — particularly in Swedish, which averages longer than English. Our experience building our own campaign: expect to need both short variants that always render in full and longer ones that carry more specific information.

What it costs

OpenAI quotes a typical range of $15–60 CPM. That is expensive compared to display, roughly in line with LinkedIn, and hard to compare directly to search because the payment model differs.

The platform now supports both CPM and CPC bidding, as well as conversion optimisation. If you choose a click or conversion objective the CPM figure still matters as a benchmark, since it is the underlying auction currency. At a reported click-through rate of around 0.91%, the conversion looks like this:

CPM	Clicks per 1,000 impressions	Effective cost per click
$15	9.1	~$1.65
$30	9.1	~$3.30
$60	9.1	~$6.59

Around $3.30 a click at the middle of the range. For B2B with high order values that is entirely defensible. For low-margin e-commerce it probably is not — at least not until there is conversion data to optimise against.

One important nuance about that click-through rate: 0.91% looks low next to Google search's roughly 6.4%, but the behaviours differ. Google users scan and click. ChatGPT users are mid-task and reluctant to break that flow. The click-through rate says more about the interface than about channel quality. The metric that actually decides this is conversion rate — and that data is still young.

Targeting does not work the way you are used to

This is the biggest adjustment, and the one that causes most early campaigns to underperform.

There are no keywords. Instead you write context hints — descriptions of the conversations, topics and buyer scenarios where your ad is relevant. They are set at ad-group level alongside the bid, and OpenAI is explicit that they are broad thematic guidance, not exact match.

The practical difference: a keyword is a string to be matched. A context hint is a description of a person and their situation. "marketing agency stockholm" is a keyword. "Someone unhappy with their current agency and comparing alternatives in Stockholm for a B2B company" is a context hint. The latter captures buying stage, role and circumstance — none of which keywords could ever represent.

On top of that you layer geography and your own audiences:

• Geographic targeting is set at campaign level across supported countries and, where available, states or regions, cities, DMAs and postal codes.
• Audience creation works from customer or prospect lists using email or phone identifiers, including supported hashed values. Minimum 25,000 matched, with 100,000+ recommended.
• Audience activation means including or excluding audiences at campaign level, with ad-group bid modifiers from 0.1× to 10×. Individual matches are never shown or selectable.

The 25,000 matched-contact threshold is worth pausing on. Most Swedish B2B companies will not come close. For them, first-party audiences are not a starting point but something to build towards — and the first realistic use is likely excluding existing customers rather than targeting.

Why 100 ads per campaign

OpenAI recommends roughly 100 ads per campaign. It sounds like a volume heuristic but it follows directly from how matching works.

The relevance model reads your context hint and your ad copy together. An ad that literally mirrors the situation the user is in scores higher than a generic line that could sit under any conversation. That inverts the usual instinct to write a handful of strong, broadly applicable ads.

Here, the breadth of specific creative is the targeting. If you want to cover ten distinct buying situations you need ten ad groups with their own context hints — and enough ad variants in each for the auction to have something to choose between.

What you cannot do yet

Ads serving in Sweden does not mean anyone can buy them. Access is staged: initially through OpenAI's Ads Solutions team, agency partners and technology partners. Self-service through Ads Manager follows later.

In practice that means two things. Early advertisers in Sweden get in through relationships rather than by signing up for an account. And per-country billing setup is still rolling out — which is exactly the constraint we are sitting in ourselves with our Swedish legal entity.

It is a wait, not a blocker. The work that determines whether the campaign performs — account structure, context hints, ad copy, square creative, measurement — can all be finished now.

What we recommend doing this month

We have built our own campaign out in full while waiting on billing: one campaign, ten ad groups, one hundred ads. Here is how we would prioritise starting today.

1. Decide whether the channel is right for you at all

At roughly $3.30 a click, order value and conversion rate need to carry the cost. Work backwards from your actual customer value before building anything.

2. Map the conversations you want to appear in

Not keywords — conversations. What do your buyers ask ChatGPT just before they become customers? That list becomes your context hints, and it should be written in both Swedish and English. Swedish professionals routinely prompt in English, and the two phrasings match differently.

3. Produce square creative

The 1:1 format is probably something you do not already have. Avoid the logo as the primary visual.

4. Make sure measurement holds up

Give every ad unique UTM parameters from the start. With a hundred ads across ten groups pointing at the same landing pages, it is the only way to see afterwards what actually worked.

5. Keep doing GEO regardless

This is the most important point. Paid placement and organic citation on AI platforms are driven by the same signals: clear positioning, structured content, documented expertise on the questions buyers actually ask. We have written about why they are the same strategy. Ads arriving in Sweden does not change that conclusion — it makes it more urgent, because the same work now pays off in two channels.

And unlike the ads, GEO does not require you to wait for billing to roll out. Read more about how we work with GEO optimization, or book a free analysis of how your brand shows up in AI answers today.