Friday, 16th January 2026
Our approach to advertising and expanding access to ChatGPT. OpenAI's long-rumored introduction of ads to ChatGPT just became a whole lot more concrete:
In the coming weeks, we’re also planning to start testing ads in the U.S. for the free and Go tiers, so more people can benefit from our tools with fewer usage limits or without having to pay. Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscriptions will not include ads.
What's "Go" tier, you might ask? That's a new $8/month tier that launched today in the USA, see Introducing ChatGPT Go, now available worldwide. It's a tier that they first trialed in India in August 2025 (here's a mention in their release notes from August listing a price of ₹399/month, which converts to around $4.40).
I'm finding the new plan comparison grid on chatgpt.com/pricing pretty confusing. It lists all accounts as having access to GPT-5.2 Thinking, but doesn't clarify the limits that the free and Go plans have to conform to. It also lists different context windows for the different plans - 16K for free, 32K for Go and Plus and 128K for Pro. I had assumed that the 400,000 token window on the GPT-5.2 model page applied to ChatGPT as well, but apparently I was mistaken.
Update: I've apparently not been paying attention: here's the Internet Archive ChatGPT pricing page from September 2025 showing those context limit differences as well.
Back to advertising: my biggest concern has always been whether ads will influence the output of the chat directly. OpenAI assure us that they will not:
- Answer independence: Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you. Answers are optimized based on what's most helpful to you. Ads are always separate and clearly labeled.
- Conversation privacy: We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers.
So what will they look like then? This screenshot from the announcement offers a useful hint:
The user asks about trips to Santa Fe, and an ad shows up for a cottage rental business there. This particular example imagines an option to start a direct chat with a bot aligned with that advertiser, at which point presumably the advertiser can influence the answers all they like!