How to advertise on ChatGPT from Israel: what opened, what it costs and what is still unknown
How to advertise on ChatGPT from Israel: who is allowed to run ads, the ₪60 minimum daily budget, how to open the account right and what is unknown.
Sponsored advertising in ChatGPT became a real option for Israeli businesses in September 2026: OpenAI lists Israel among the countries where a self-serve advertising account can be opened. Before anything else, one distinction. An ad in ChatGPT is something you pay for, and it appears below the answer. Appearing organically inside the answer itself is an entirely different job. This article breaks down what has actually opened, which businesses are not permitted to advertise at all, what is known about the cost, how to advertise on ChatGPT without making the usual mistakes, and what is still unknown. The picture is moving fast, so everything written here is correct as of 17 September 2026.
What exactly opened for businesses in Israel
On OpenAI's Ads Manager availability page, Israel is marked as Available. The condition: the legal entity that advertises and pays has to be registered in a country that appears on the list. According to reports in the Israeli press, Israel was added to the list on 16 September 2026.
That said, this is a list of advertisers, not of users. Whether people in Israel are already seeing ads is a separate question, and the answer to it is less clear:
- What was reported: according to a report in Geektime, OpenAI confirmed that it is beginning to show ads in the Middle East and North Africa, including Israel, and the reporters came across a first ad.
- What has not been published: as of 17 September 2026, OpenAI's own help pages and blog carry no date and no scope for users in Israel. Other outlets stressed that opening the system to advertisers is not confirmation that ads are being served to everyone.
The bottom line: you can set up an account right now. How many people in Israel will see the ads, and from when, is still unknown. And even then, according to OpenAI, ads can appear on the Free and Go tiers. Subscribers on Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu do not see ads, and neither do accounts identified as belonging to users under 18.
Which businesses cannot advertise on ChatGPT
This is the most important section for a business owner in Israel, because it shuts the channel to a long list of fields. According to OpenAI's advertising policies, updated on 10 September 2026, at this stage the ads focus mainly on consumer and household products, local services, travel and experiences, and digital products or study.
| Field | The position under the ad policy | Who that is in Israel |
|---|---|---|
| Financial services | Not allowed as a rule | Insurance agents, mortgage advisers, loans |
| Healthcare services | Not allowed as a rule | Clinics, medical practices, aesthetic medicine |
| Legal services | Not allowed at present | Lawyers and law firms |
| Specific jobs and properties | Not allowed anywhere, including in the US | A job ad, a flat to rent or to buy |
On top of that, advertising gambling, alcohol and tobacco, adult content (including dating apps) and political content is not permitted at present. A site that aggregates jobs or properties is allowed to advertise, as long as the ad and the landing page do not present one particular job or property.
The mistake worth sparing yourself: building creative and landing pages before you have checked the category. At the account verification stage, OpenAI also checks whether what you sell is allowed to be advertised. If your business is in the table, this channel is closed to you for now, and the budget is better placed in the channels that already work.
For the full list of allowed, blocked and gray-area categories, including what to do when an ad is rejected, see our guide to the ChatGPT ads policy.
How advertising on ChatGPT actually works
The ad appears below the end of the answer, marked as sponsored and visually separated from it. According to the basics of ChatGPT Ads, every ad carries an advertiser name, an icon (favicon), a headline, text, a landing page and an image.
The big difference from Google: there are no keywords. At ad-group level you write "context hints", a description of the conversations and subjects in which your service is relevant. OpenAI states explicitly that these hints are not exact-match keywords and do not guarantee that an ad will be shown. The system picks an ad from the context of the conversation, the landing page, the headline, the text and the hints, and ranks them in a second-price auction weighted by relevance.
In other words: in Google you buy intent by the word. In ChatGPT you describe what you offer and to whom, and the system decides. There is less control, and the ad reaches the user after they have already been given an answer. What comes back to you is aggregate data only, with no access to the conversations.
And what about appearing inside the answer itself? OpenAI writes that ads do not affect ChatGPT's answers. Paying for an ad will therefore not make ChatGPT recommend you. Being mentioned inside the answer takes organic work, and we set that out in our guide to AI search optimisation (GEO). The wider picture of AI in marketing is in how AI is changing digital marketing.
What advertising on ChatGPT costs: the numbers known today
There is one hard number. In the minimum-budget table on the create campaigns page there is a shekel line: a minimum daily budget of ₪60 (for comparison, $25 in a dollar account). A daily budget is an average across seven days: on a single day the spend can reach up to twice that, and across a week no more than seven times it. Simple arithmetic: a full month at the minimum budget is about ₪1,800.
How do you pay? There are three campaign objectives. Views is charged per thousand impressions, Clicks per click, and Conversions is charged per click or per impressions while optimising towards a conversion. You do not pay per conversion.
The only numeric recommendation OpenAI publishes: in a clicks campaign, start with a maximum bid of $3–5 per click. There is no guidance in shekels.
What is missing:
- No benchmarks. OpenAI itself writes that the channel does not yet have accepted performance data by industry or campaign type.
- No Israeli data. Most of the numbers circulating online come from the pilot period, mainly from the US, and they come from third parties rather than from OpenAI. Anyone who hands you a cost per click for Israel today is guessing.
Treat the first month, then, as a paid experiment. Compare the cost per lead against what you already pay elsewhere, for example in Facebook and Instagram advertising.
How to open a ChatGPT Ads account properly: 7 steps
- Check the category. If you are in the table above, stop here.
- Open the account in the business's name. Signing up at ads.openai.com requires an OpenAI account. You pick a country, a currency and a time zone, and they cannot be changed later. Make sure the shekel is offered to you at signup.
- Complete verification and billing. After verification through Persona the account is reviewed, and OpenAI does not fast-track reviews. Billing is by a credit card that matches the business entity. Without an account name and a logo, the ads will not be shown.
- Give access, do not hand over ownership. Every advertiser needs an account of their own. The business opens the account and then invites the agency as a user (Settings, Users, Invite). That way the account stays yours.
- Do not block the crawlers. The OAI-AdsBot bot is needed in order to approve the landing page, and OAI-SearchBot is recommended. Check your robots.txt and your settings in Cloudflare or the firewall.
- Set up measurement. At the very least, UTMs on every link. Better still, OpenAI's Pixel or the Conversions API, and preserve the oppref parameter through redirects. The fundamentals are explained in our conversion tracking guide.
- Prepare several versions. A headline of 16–24 characters (up to 50), text of 32–48 characters (up to 100), a square image up to 1200×1200, and a specific landing page rather than the home page.
Note this as well: a new account can at first advertise only in its home country. The restriction is lifted after verification and after a certain level of spend, and OpenAI has not published the figure.
What is still unknown (as of 17 September 2026)
- Users in Israel: whether the ads are shown to all Free and Go users, and from what date.
- Hebrew: whether the Ads Manager interface is available in Hebrew, how an ad in Hebrew passes review and is displayed right-to-left, and how context hints in Hebrew are matched to conversations in Hebrew.
- Invoicing: whether an Israeli account is in fact billed in shekels, and how VAT and invoices are handled.
- Targeting: OpenAI allows targeting by cities and regions "where that is available". What is available in Israel has not been published.
- Timings and prices: how long verification takes, and what a click costs in Israel.
Our recommendation: advertising on ChatGPT is worth a small experiment for consumer brands, shops, local services, travel and study, provided proper conversion measurement is in place. A business in a prohibited category, or one that is not yet measuring conversions in Google and Meta, should wait.
What Simple Web does about it
Simple Web is an AI-first marketing agency from Bnei Brak, certified Meta partners and Google advertising experts, working with 200+ businesses and holding 28 five-star Google reviews. We run paid campaigns in Google Ads and in paid social: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn. The campaigns include real conversion measurement, daily monitoring, AI-assisted tuning and a monthly cost-per-lead report. Paid-media management starts at ₪3,500 a month, not including the ad budget, and the ad accounts always stay yours.
Since September 2026 we also run ChatGPT ad campaigns: we check that your category is approved for advertising from Israel, guide the account setup, write the ads and context hints, and install conversion tracking.
ChatGPT Ads is a channel in beta, and the decision on whether to try it is best taken against the numbers from the channels that already work for you. A good place to start is our free marketing audit: it checks Google rankings, visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, wasted budget in Meta and Google Ads, and conversions and speed on the site. The report arrives in Hebrew on WhatsApp within 48 hours, and it is 100% free with no commitment.
Summary
Advertising on ChatGPT has been open to Israeli advertisers since the middle of September 2026, according to the press reports, with a minimum budget of ₪60 a day. How many users in Israel see the ads, by contrast, is still not clear. Finance, healthcare and legal services, along with ads for specific jobs and properties, are closed for now. A business in a permitted category with proper measurement in place can start with a small experiment, without expecting benchmarks. Want to check whether the channel suits your business? Book a free diagnostic call.
Sources
- OpenAI: Ads Manager availability by country: Israel on the list of countries available to advertisers
- OpenAI: creating campaigns for ChatGPT Ads: the ₪60 minimum daily budget, the campaign objectives and the home-country restriction
- OpenAI: advertising policies: prohibited and restricted fields, updated 10 September 2026
- OpenAI: ads in ChatGPT, the basics: the structure of the ad, context hints and the $3–5 per click recommendation
- Geektime: report on ads starting to appear in the region: the report that OpenAI is beginning to show ads in the Middle East, including Israel
