OpenAI Is Expanding ChatGPT Access and Planning Ad Tests

A few quiet changes around ChatGPT are starting to stack up. OpenAI is expanding access by rolling out its lower-cost ChatGPT Go plan more widely, while also laying the groundwork for advertising inside ChatGPT’s free and Go tiers. None of this is fully live yet, but together it signals a change in how the product is funded and who it’s trying to reach.

To be clear, ads are not currently showing inside ChatGPT. What OpenAI has said is that it plans to begin limited ad testing in the coming weeks, starting with logged-in adult users in the United States. These ads would appear alongside or below responses when a sponsored product or service is relevant. OpenAI says they will be clearly labeled and kept separate from the AI’s actual answers.

What’s Changing on Access

On the access side, ChatGPT Go is now available wherever ChatGPT operates. The plan costs $8 per month and sits below ChatGPT Plus. It offers higher message limits, image uploads, and a larger context window than the free tier, but fewer features than the higher-priced options. Free users still have access, just with tighter limits.

Taken together, the Go tier and upcoming ad tests point in the same direction. OpenAI is trying to keep ChatGPT usable for people who do not want or cannot afford higher subscription prices, without locking everything behind a paywall. Ads, in this framing, become a way to subsidize usage rather than replace subscriptions outright.

How the Ads Are Supposed to Work

OpenAI has outlined a few guardrails it says will shape how ads appear. Ads will not influence ChatGPT’s responses, and conversations themselves will not be shared with advertisers. Users will have controls to limit personalization, and OpenAI says ads will not appear in sensitive areas like health or politics. The company also says it will not show ads to users it knows or predicts are under 18.

In practice, the ads would show up as a clearly marked block below a response, not blended into the answer itself. That distinction matters. OpenAI is trying to avoid the feeling that answers are being shaped or nudged by sponsorships, which is a line many platforms have struggled to hold once ads enter the picture.

History, Costs, and Expectations

Advertising was not part of OpenAI’s early public story. The company leaned heavily on subscriptions and enterprise contracts as ChatGPT grew, even as usage exploded and operating costs climbed. With hundreds of millions of users now interacting with the product, most of them on free or low-cost plans, the pressure to diversify revenue has become harder to ignore.

That is where expectations come into play. Many users see ChatGPT less like a social platform and more like a utility. Introducing ads changes that relationship, even if the underlying answers stay the same. Whether people accept that trade-off, tolerate it, or push back will depend on how visible, restrained, and genuinely separate the ads feel once testing begins.

For now, the situation is fairly straightforward. OpenAI is expanding access while experimenting with how to pay for scale. Ads are planned, but limited, and not embedded into answers. What matters most is not the announcement itself, but how this plays out once real users start seeing it in practice.