What happened

If you use the free version of ChatGPT in Taiwan, you may now see an ad next to the answer to your question. It’s clearly labelled as an ad and kept separate from the answer ChatGPT writes, and Taiwan companies can now open an account online and buy that slot themselves.

OpenAI announced on 23 September 2026 that ChatGPT ads are starting to roll out in Taiwan and six Southeast Asian countries. The announcement restates that ads are always clearly labelled, kept separate from ChatGPT’s answers, and don’t influence those answers. Not everyone sees them, though: ads appear only for people on the Free plan and the low-cost paid plan, Go. The pricier plans stay ad-free.

For Taiwan businesses, the big change is that they can buy directly. There are three ways to buy ChatGPT ads: through OpenAI’s own ad team, through the big agency groups, or self-serve through OpenAI’s ad dashboard, Ads Manager. OpenAI’s Help Center lists Taiwan as available for self-serve, as long as the company placing and paying for the ads is based in a country on the list. In practice, a Taiwan-registered company can now place ChatGPT ads itself, no agency required.

Plenty of companies are already buying. At the end of August, OpenAI said its ad business was under 200 days old and already had tens of thousands of advertisers.

Why it matters to you

Say you run an interior design studio in Taichung. A prospective client opens the free version of ChatGPT and asks which firms in Taichung are good for renovating an older home. OpenAI explained in August that its ad system reads what the current conversation is about and serves an ad that fits. So that exact question can now carry a paid ad next to the answer, and the buyer could well be a competitor down the road who opened their own Ads Manager account.

That puts two kinds of recommendation on the same screen: the one ChatGPT wrote into its answer after making its own call, and the one someone paid to place beside it. OpenAI says ads don’t influence answers. If that holds up, money buys the slot beside the answer and nothing more, and the answer itself still isn’t for sale.

Which leaves a brand in one of three positions. In the first, you’re in the answer and a rival’s ad sits next to it: the AI’s recommendation is still pointing at you. In the second, you’re missing from the answer and the ad beside it isn’t yours either: that question belongs to someone else from start to finish. The third is the awkward one: you’re missing from the answer while your own ad sits beside it. What the customer sees is ChatGPT recommending someone else, with your paid slot squeezed in beside it: you’ve paid to stand next to a recommendation for somebody else.

So ads can add weight when the answer already includes you. When it doesn’t, they can’t make up the gap.

What to do about it

Yes, act, and start with whether ChatGPT’s answer includes you. You can try ads if the budget allows, and you can open an account today. But anyone can buy them: whatever you buy today, a competitor can buy tomorrow. The moment your budget stops, the slot goes to someone else, and getting there first counts for little.

A place in the answer takes a different kind of work. For ChatGPT to think of you however a client phrases the question, your website’s content has to be something AI can read and pull the key points from: what services you offer, which area you cover, how to book, all spelled out clearly. On top of that, wherever others write about you, in news stories, blogs or forums, your company name, address and services should match what your own website says. There’s no opening an account today and showing up tomorrow. The upside is that once you hold that place, nobody can outbid you for it overnight.

The catch is that it’s hard to see whether the answer includes you at all. Ads Manager already shows how much you spent on ads and where it went, and OpenAI says measurement solutions are coming in the months ahead, so the ad side is only going to get more numbers. Your place in the answer has no dashboard to log into. How clients phrase their questions about your line of business, which phrasings bring you up in the answer and which leave you out: no report lists any of it. Change the phrasing or the timing and the answer may change, so to tell whether your position is improving or slipping, you have to put many phrasings to it in batches, ask again a while later and compare; ask only a handful and what you see is mostly luck.

That kind of ongoing, batch checking is part of our managed GEO service at geoweb.tw. GEO is about getting AI to describe you accurately when it answers questions, and to recommend you. With the managed service, our team fixes your website content, makes what other websites say about you consistent, and regularly checks how each AI engine describes you. All you do is sign off on the results.

To find out whether ChatGPT includes you when it answers questions about your line of business, ask one of our consultants to walk you through it: book a time, and they’ll take a need your clients often raise, phrase it several different ways and type each one into ChatGPT. Sitting beside them, you’ll see which phrasings bring you up.

Further reading