What happened

On 23 September 2026, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT ads are starting to roll out across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan. Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea and India were already live in the region. OpenAI now says ChatGPT ads are available in more than 60 countries. At the end of August, its own figure was “more than 40.”

Ads are shown only to users on the Free plan and the low-cost Go plan; Plus, Pro and Enterprise stay ad-free. The announcement restates that ads are always clearly labelled and kept separate from ChatGPT’s answers, and that advertising doesn’t influence those answers.

There are three ways to buy: through OpenAI’s own Ads Solutions team, through agency groups such as dentsu, Havas Media, Omnicom Media, Publicis Groupe and WPP, or self-serve through Ads Manager. The last one matters most here. OpenAI’s Help Center lists Taiwan as available for self-serve, on the condition that the legal entity running and paying for the ads is based in a listed country. In practice, a Taiwan-registered company can now place ChatGPT ads itself, no agency required.

The announcement also quotes a Shopee marketing executive saying the two companies’ collaboration, which followed the ChatGPT Ads launch in Brazil, now extends to Southeast Asia and Taiwan. On scale, OpenAI said at the end of August that its ad business had passed a $1 billion annualised run rate in under 200 days, with tens of thousands of advertisers on the platform.

Why it matters to you

On 16 September OpenAI unveiled Sponsored Agents, which put a brand’s own AI agent inside the conversation. The first advertisers were Wayfair and Angi, both American, and at the time it read like a story from the other side of the Pacific. A week later, a different product line reached Taiwan: ordinary ad placements.

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 the context of the current conversation and serves an ad that fits. So that exact question can now carry a paid slot 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. If OpenAI’s claim that ads don’t influence answers holds up, then money buys the slot beside the answer and nothing more.

Which leaves a brand in one of three positions. You’re in the answer and a rival’s ad sits next to it: the AI’s recommendation is still pointing at you. You’re in neither: that question belongs to someone else from start to finish. The awkward one is being missing from the answer while your own ad sits beside it, which amounts to paying to stand next to a recommendation for somebody else. 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

Whether to buy ads is a budget question, and if you want to test, you can open an account today. The low barrier cuts both ways, though: whatever you can buy today, a competitor can buy tomorrow, the slot disappears the moment the budget stops, 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 site’s content has to be something AI can read and lift, and what others say about you off-site has to line up with it. 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.

OpenAI says it will keep adding markets over the coming months, along with new ad formats, optimisation tools and measurement solutions. The ad side is only going to get more numbers: Ads Manager already shows where the money went and how much of it, and more ways to measure results are on the way. 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. Someone has to write the questions out one by one, actually ask them and record every answer. That hand-kept record is the only dashboard the answer will ever have.

Book a managed-service demo to see how clients in your line of business phrase their questions, and which of those answers already include you.

Further reading