ChatGPT Plus and Pro Will Get Ads in 2027

ChatGPT Plus and Pro will get ads, and my guess is that it starts in 2027. OpenAIs own ad principles from January state that "Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscriptions will not include ads". But I'm pretty sure that promise will not survive, for the same reason Google has never sold an ad-free version of search.

Last week I wrote about why I am bullish on ChatGPT ads. ChatGPT has become the place where people research what they are about to buy. Relevant, clearly labeled ads worked for Google in 2002. OpenAI started testing ads on February 9 for Free and Go users in the US, and on August 31 it reported $1 billion in annualized revenue in under 200 days, with ads in over 40 countries. Go costs $8 a month, so ChatGPT already shows ads to paying customers. OpenAI launched Go in 171 countries before bringing it to the US in January as its low-cost plan, and it expects most of its paying subscribers to end up there. In April, The Information reported an internal OpenAI forecast in which Plus falls from 44 million subscribers in 2025 to 9 million this year and Go grows from 3 million to 112 million. The line OpenAI drew is at $20 a month.

Google has sold ads on search for more than 25 years and has never let you pay to turn them off. The closest it came was Contributor, a subscription that bid against advertisers on your behalf on partner sites. It launched in November 2014, was shut down in January 2017, came back in June 2017 as a per-page fee, and was then left to die.

Amazon put ads into Prime Video on January 29, 2024, for everyone who was already paying. This month, Disney+ subscribers across Europe were asked to accept an updated agreement under which every plan, including Premium, "may include promotional content, sponsorships, and advertisements before/after playback of Content". Disney told Golem that this applies to all plans. In a 2019 Digiday survey, 74% of publishers said they serve ads to their paying subscribers. The New York Times said in June 2016 that it would launch an ad-free subscription, and ten years later its subscription page still does not offer one.

The reason all of these companies keep ads in front of paying customers is that ad money is spread very unevenly across users. WordStream's 2026 benchmarks, from 13,474 US search campaigns, put the median Google Ads click at $5.42, with attorneys and legal services at $9.87 and arts and entertainment at $1.63, and those are medians across whole industries, so the expensive keywords inside them cost a multiple of that. A large part of any free user base never earns the platform anything, and a small part of users make up for the bulk of ad income.

The people who pay $20 or $200 a month for ChatGPT are that small part. They are professionals, founders, people who buy software and services for a company, and people with money to spend on themselves. If you sell B2B software, legal services, or anything else with a $10 click, your customers are not on the free tier. OpenAI reported more than 50 million consumer subscribers and over 9 million paying business users in February, and under the current rules not one of them can be reached with an ad. The advertisers with the highest bids are locked out of the audience they are bidding for.

OpenAI will not build a $100 billion ad business on users that can't even afford a plus subscription, and $100 billion by 2030 is what OpenAI told investors in April, with $2.5 billion this year and $11 billion in 2027.

OpenAI needs that money. It lost $20.9 billion in operations on $13.1 billion of revenue in 2025. I do not see how you get from $2.5 billion to $11 billion in one year by showing more ads to people who rarely buy anything. You get there by selling the audience that advertisers already pay $10 a click for on Google, and that audience is on Plus and Pro.

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