How to create a ChatGPT Ads account: the full setup walkthrough

What to have ready before you start

Nothing exotic, but having it all on hand keeps you from stalling halfway through:

• An OpenAI account. If you don't have one, you can create it during the Ads Manager sign-up flow.
• Your company's legal details: registered name, address, country of establishment.
• A valid payment card (credit or debit) and its billing address.
• What you need for identity verification, handled by the provider Persona.
• The email addresses of colleagues who will need access to the account.

One prerequisite people skip: your business has to be based in a supported country. If it is, you can sign up directly through ads.openai.com.

Where the account lives: Ads Manager (beta)

The management interface is called Ads Manager, and OpenAI's documentation still labels it a beta. That's where the advertiser account is created, where billing and users are configured, and where you later build campaigns, ad groups and ads.

OpenAI is specific about one organizational point: only one person, the account owner, should create the advertiser account. Everyone else gets invited afterward. Spinning up several parallel accounts "just to test" is the fastest route to orphaned accounts that cannot be merged.

The setup flow, step by step

1. Open the Ads Manager sign-up flow and log in with an OpenAI account (or create one at that point).
2. Enter your business details, including the country for your advertiser account. This is the step that actually creates the account.
3. Set the account parameters: country or region, billing currency, timezone. See the next section, these three are irreversible.
4. Answer the verification questions handled through Persona. Your application then goes into review.
5. Set up billing and add a payment method.
6. Invite your team members from Settings, then Users, then Invite.

Once the account is approved, you can build your first campaign. Plan for review not being instant: this is not a flow to start the day before a product launch.

Country, currency and timezone: the three irreversible choices

This is the paragraph to read twice. OpenAI documents it in plain terms: the country or region, billing currency, and time zone selected when an advertiser account is created cannot be changed later. These settings affect billing, reporting and account eligibility.

The practical consequences are concrete:

If you're unsure, settle it with whoever owns finance before confirming the screen. There is no documented after-the-fact correction procedure.

Persona identity verification and going into review

After you finish entering your business and account details, OpenAI asks a few additional questions for account verification through Persona, a third-party identity verification provider. Once those questions are complete, your account application goes into review.

Two things worth anticipating. First, some industries are reviewed manually, case by case: OpenAI says it may approve advertisers in financial services, healthcare and medicine, and legal services, rolled out gradually with manual review. Second, an advertiser whose primary business model falls into a restricted or prohibited category may simply be ineligible, regardless of how good the application is. We cover that in our guide to ChatGPT Ads policies.

Billing: card, temporary hold and payment threshold

Adding a payment method requires your card details and billing address. A detail that regularly surprises finance teams: your bank may show a temporary $100 authorization while OpenAI verifies the card. It is not a charge.

Ongoing billing then runs on a payment threshold assigned to your account: your saved card is charged once unpaid spend reaches that threshold. For example, with a $25 payment threshold, the card is charged each time $25 of unpaid spend accrues. OpenAI notes that approved advertisers typically start with a lower payment threshold, which may be raised automatically over time based on successful payment history and other factors.

The consequence to know: if a payment fails after your account reaches its threshold, your ads may stop delivering until the billing issue is resolved. An expired card is a mundane but common cause of a stalled campaign.

Inviting your team: users, roles and administration

Once the account exists, invite colleagues from Settings, then Users, then Invite, entering the email addresses of the people you want to add.

Two administration layers coexist, and confusing them is a classic source of support tickets:

• Ad account roles control what someone can do inside a specific Ads Manager account, such as viewing or managing campaigns.
• The Ads Admin role, in the Global Admin Console, manages Ads users, groups, and SSO and SCIM settings at the organization level.

For organizations that already run an identity provider, OpenAI documents SSO and SCIM setup for Ads Manager. This is the right moment to handle it, before you've hand-invited ten people.

The agency case: one account per advertiser

A structural point, and better known before you sell the engagement: each advertiser needs its own account. An agency managing several advertisers has to create an account per advertiser. There is an additional documented constraint: each new advertiser account must be created with a different email address, an address already used to create an advertiser account cannot create a second one.

The good news, usually missing from content that just copies other content: once accounts exist, the same user can be invited as a member or administrator of multiple advertiser accounts and switch between them. A single email address can therefore access several ad accounts, as long as it has been assigned a role in each.

Put plainly: the constraint is on creating accounts, not on daily access. Agencies should plan a naming convention for dedicated creation addresses up front (one alias per client, for example), then grant consultants access through their own named addresses.

Opening an account from Europe

ChatGPT Ads expanded to 31 European countries on August 24, 2026, including Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Austria. It is the program's largest expansion since US testing began six months earlier.

Two nuances matter for a European advertiser:

• Initial access runs through the OpenAI Ads Solutions team, agency partners and technology partners. Self-service access through Ads Manager is announced for later.
• Personalized ads are not initially available in the European Economic Area or Switzerland. Targeting there rests on the conversation context and your context hints, not on a user history.

That last point changes how you prepare campaigns: the relative weight of your context hints and of landing page quality is mechanically higher than in the US.

After creation: three checks before your first campaign

The account exists, but you're not ready yet. Three checks prevent most launch-day surprises:

1. Make your landing pages reachable by OpenAI's crawlers. The documentation is explicit: landing pages must not block the OAI-AdsBot and OAI-SearchBot user agents. OAI-AdsBot is required for ChatGPT Ads landing page validation and review. So check robots.txt, but also your WAF, CDN, bot mitigation, authentication and rate limiting. OpenAI publishes IP range lists for allowlisting at openai.com/adsbot.json and openai.com/searchbot.json.
2. Set up conversion measurement if you plan to optimize toward conversions. It is a hard technical prerequisite, covered in our guide to the ChatGPT Ads pixel and conversion tracking.
3. Check your creative and landing pages against the ad policies, including for industries that look harmless.

You can test in a minute whether your pages work as an ad destination with our ChatGPT Ads landing page checker.

Account is live but nothing is delivering: what to check

OpenAI's troubleshooting documentation gives a checklist to run before concluding there's a bug, when delivery is zero:

• Is billing fully set up and the payment method valid?
• Has the campaign budget already been reached?
• Has the campaign end date passed?
• Has the account successfully completed verification?

OpenAI recommends allowing at least 24 hours after launch before flagging delivery issues. If the Help Center doesn't answer your question, the listed contact is ads-support@openai.com. On top of that, CPC campaigns have their own zero-delivery cause: a bid set too low, which we cover in our guide to ChatGPT Ads pricing.

What is not publicly documented

For intellectual honesty, here are the points we found no official source for, and that we prefer to flag as unconfirmed rather than invent:

• The review turnaround time for an advertiser account application.
• The precise approval criteria for the case-by-case industries.
• The exact initial payment threshold assigned to a new account, or the pace at which it is raised (OpenAI only says it starts lower and may increase automatically).
• Whether a centralized multi-account structure comparable to a Google Ads MCC exists for pooled budget management.

If any of these gets documented before you read this, the page will be updated.