OpenAI's advertising platform is still in early days, but it's moving fast. This week's update from the company covers six changes: a ChatGPT plugin for campaign management, expanded custom audience controls, better conversion matching, new carousel reporting, total budget pacing, and a geographic expansion into Europe, India, the Middle East, and North Africa. If you're watching this channel or already running campaigns, here's what changed.
You Can Now Manage Campaigns From ChatGPT
The most eye-catching update is the ChatGPT Ads Manager plugin. You add it from the Plugins menu, connect your ad account, and then manage campaigns through a conversation. You can describe a website or a creative brief in plain language and get ready-to-launch ads out the other end. The plugin also handles campaign updates, delivery troubleshooting, performance review, and prioritized recommendations.
What's worth noting is that the plugin previews changes before it applies them. It asks for confirmation rather than making changes unilaterally, which is a sensible design choice for anything that touches live spend. This is also a Codex-compatible integration, so if you're working programmatically, that access is there too.
The practical upside is speed. Turning a brief into a campaign has historically involved a lot of tab-switching. Whether the output quality is worth leaning on depends on how mature the creative recommendations are, and that's still an open question for a platform this young.
Custom Audiences Got Significantly More Flexible
The custom audience update is a meaningful operational improvement. You can now add, remove, or replace audience members without rebuilding the audience from scratch. You can also mix identifier types in the same upload request, which saves teams from the tedium of rebuilding audiences just to fix inconsistent data.
A few other specific changes: audiences smaller than 25,000 matched users can now be used for exclusions; audiences can now scale beyond 5 million members; and you'll see more granular size ranges in the interface so you're not guessing where you land. Google Advertising ID (GAID) is also now a supported identifier type, which makes mobile audience matching more practical for Android-focused campaigns.
Conversion Matching Has More Fields to Work With
Both the Measurement Pixel and the Conversions API got new matching fields this week. The Pixel now accepts hashed phone number, first name, last name, region, and postal code. The Conversions API adds plural list fields for hashed email, phone, external ID, first and last name, country, city, region, and postal code, plus Android GAID for mobile.
More matching fields means better signal quality, which generally means better attribution and better optimization. If you're already using the Pixel or CAPI and you haven't updated your implementation to pass these fields, it's worth doing. The platform can only use what you send it.
Carousel Reporting Is Now Available
For product feed campaigns that serve in the multi-product carousel format, reporting now includes carousel card impressions and clicks in Ads Manager, and product-level data is available in the public Insights API. A carousel card impression is counted when an individual product card becomes viewable, and it's worth knowing that these are separate from billable ad impressions and don't count toward billable totals.
Full data is available starting August 20, 2026, on a rolling 30-day basis. If you've been running carousel campaigns and wondering what's happening at the card level, now you can see it.
Total Budget Campaigns Now Have Pacing
Campaigns set to a total budget now include pacing to spread spend more evenly over the campaign's duration. OpenAI notes that actual daily spend can still vary depending on delivery opportunities, so this isn't a strict daily cap; it's a smoothing mechanism. If you've had campaigns burn through budget too quickly in early days, this is the fix for that.
Where ChatGPT Ads Are Available Now
ChatGPT Ads launched in the United States in February 2026 and have been expanding market by market ever since. This week's rollout adds self-serve access across Europe, India, the Middle East, and North Africa, bringing the total to 52 countries on OpenAI's official availability list.
The full set of supported countries as of this week: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Brazil, India, and the 11 MENA markets of Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, and Tunisia. Europe adds 31 markets: the 27 EU member states (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden) plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland.
If your brand has customers in any of those markets, the inventory is there. The US remains the most mature market with the broadest targeting options, but the new self-serve access in Europe and MENA means you're no longer waiting on a managed buy to test those regions.
On the horizon: a new conversion optimization model that optimizes on view-through conversions in addition to click-based conversions. Billing will be impression-based, and delivery will optimize toward your selected conversion goal. More details are coming as the rollout broadens, but it's a meaningful signal that the platform is building out the optimization options that most performance advertisers expect.
If you're thinking about how AI-native ad platforms fit into your broader channel mix, or you want to talk through what a test on this platform could look like for your brand, schedule a call and we can work through it together.