Essay

ChatGPT Keeps Drifting Further Down the Ads Road

2026-09-18

A bold prediction: Chat mode and Codex mode will stay separated forever.

I get a ChatGPT product update email roughly every two weeks. Another one landed yesterday: impression billing for conversion optimization is now GA. Which means the ad product has basically caught up with the mainstream media platforms — barely scraping into big-league territory.

The ChatGPT ad card. It sits at the end of the answer. Pretty bare.

I had AI lay out the update timeline from the last two months.

July 10

- Custom audiences
- Japan and Korea opened

July 25

- oCPC
- AAM, but you have to switch it on yourself
- Daily budget becomes a seven-day average

August 6

- AAM flipped to on-by-default for new pixels, existing pixels get it on August 17 — opt out yourself if you don't want it
- Pixel validation diagnostics
- Brazil and Mexico announced

August 21

- Maximize results, which is just nobid
- View-through conversions start reporting
- Brazil and Mexico opened

September 4

- Ads Manager plugin — you can build campaigns from inside chatgpt or codex
- Match fields expanded a lot: hashed phone, name, region, postal code, GAID
- Europe, India, the Middle East and North Africa opened

September 17

- Impression billing GA
- Pick your attribution window
- Shopify and HubSpot integrations
- AI writes your copy and images, and rewrites and translates them for you
- Event Quality Score, 1 to 10 on your data sources
- Sponsored Agents in testing

Sponsored Agents means after you click the ad you land in a labelled merchant agent and keep talking to it.

Sponsored Agents: click the ad, land in the merchant's agent, keep the conversation going. Underwhelming.

They're opening countries fast too. In the beginning it was only the US, then Japan and Korea in July, Brazil and Mexico in August, then 31 European countries plus India, the Middle East and North Africa in September.

The subsidies haven't caught up with the big platforms though. So far the only offer I've received is $500 in matched ad credit. The ad image they AI-generated for me was pretty weak too.

Looking forward to more forms of subsidy once the product matures.

One more prediction while I'm here. ChatGPT's Chat mode and Codex mode will stay separated forever, and Plus users will very likely start seeing ads at some point.

Claude merged Chat and Cowork on September 16. No more switching tabs.

The two big labs have taken completely different roads.