ChatGPT Ads: Click-Through Rates Exceed 1% in Key Markets, Lag in English-Speaking Countries
ChatGPT Ads Click-Through Rates Exceed 1% in Four Markets but Lag in English-Speaking Countries
Brazil leads global performance as OpenAI expands advertising to more than 60 countries
ChatGPT ads are clicking at rates above 1% in Brazil, Mexico, Japan, and South Korea — but advertisers in the U.S. and other English-speaking markets are seeing significantly lower engagement, according to a report published September 29 by growth agency Graphite.
The findings arrive at a pivotal moment for OpenAI's advertising ambitions. As the platform expands its ad product to more than 60 countries and forges new partnerships with Amazon and Shopify, marketers are searching for reliable benchmarks to evaluate performance — and this report offers the clearest picture yet of what early ChatGPT ad engagement actually looks like across global markets. For broader context on how AI-powered chatbots are reshaping business communication, the trajectory of ChatGPT's commercial evolution is worth watching closely.
What the Click-Through Rate Data Reveals
The Graphite report, titled The State of ChatGPT Ads, draws on panel data from Similarweb and covers Free and Go plan users across nine live markets. It measures all-time click-through rates from the first week each market appeared in the data through September 16.
Brazil posted the highest CTR at 1.91%, followed by Mexico at 1.55%, Japan at 1.53%, and South Korea at 1.21%. The five English-language markets clustered closely together in a notably lower range:
- Canada: 0.75%
- United Kingdom: 0.74%
- United States: 0.73%
- Australia: 0.67%
- New Zealand: 0.60%
OpenAI began testing ads in the U.S. on February 9. Its August 11 update confirmed that ads had launched in the U.K., Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and South Korea. The U.K. joined that later wave yet produced a CTR nearly identical to the U.S. rate — suggesting market timing alone does not explain the performance gap.
It is worth noting that the markets do not cover the same stretch of time. Each has between five and 25 weeks of data, making direct comparisons more nuanced than a simple ranking might suggest.
Why Non-English Markets May Be Outperforming
The disparity between non-English and English-speaking markets raises an important question for advertisers: is this a language effect, a novelty effect, or something structural? Several factors may be contributing.
In markets like Brazil and Mexico, ChatGPT's ad product launched more recently, meaning users may not yet have developed the ad-blindness that tends to accumulate over time in more mature digital advertising environments. In Japan and South Korea, where conversational AI interfaces have been adopted with notable enthusiasm, users may be engaging with AI-generated responses — including sponsored content — with a higher degree of active attention.
English-speaking markets, by contrast, have longer exposure to digital advertising across search, social, and now AI platforms. That familiarity can suppress click-through rates as users develop habitual patterns of ignoring promotional content. None of this is confirmed by the Graphite report, but it represents a reasonable working hypothesis for marketers interpreting the data.
How the Numbers Are Calculated — and What They Don't Show
CTR in this report is calculated as the number of clicks per ad-bearing exchange — meaning one user message paired with ChatGPT's response. The total clicks are divided by the number of replies that contained an ad, pooled across all advertisers in each market.
Similarweb provides percentages and shares rather than exact counts. As a result, the report does not reveal how many individual users or replies sit behind each market's rate. Advertisers looking to compare their own campaign CTR directly against these figures will find that difficult without the underlying volume data.
Brooke Osmundson noted on September 8 that advertisers still have little context for judging what strong ChatGPT Ads performance looks like. OpenAI's own help center acknowledges that ChatGPT Ads currently lacks performance benchmarks across different advertisers, industries, or campaign types.
The report also describes its coverage as "all nine live markets." OpenAI announced on August 18 that ChatGPT Ads would expand to 31 European countries the following week and confirmed on August 31 that the product was available in more than 40 countries. None of those European markets appear in the report's per-market charts.
The Benchmark Problem — and Why It Matters
The absence of reliable benchmarks is not a minor inconvenience — it is one of the most significant practical obstacles facing advertisers on the platform right now. Without industry-level or format-level comparisons, marketers cannot accurately assess whether a 0.73% CTR in the U.S. represents underperformance, par performance, or a result worth scaling. Understanding how to approach paid search ad intelligence and campaign benchmarking offers a useful framework for thinking about how performance standards typically develop in emerging ad environments — and how long it can take before consensus benchmarks emerge.
This gap also makes budget allocation decisions harder. Marketers accustomed to established platforms with well-documented average CTRs are navigating ChatGPT Ads largely by instinct and early experimentation, which elevates both the risk and the potential upside for early movers.
Advertisers Are Still Experimenting — and the Roster Keeps Shifting
Consistency among top ChatGPT advertisers has been hard to find. Of the 100 largest advertisers tracked by worldwide impression share over 20 weeks from May 4 to September 14, only Jotform and Resume.io ranked in the top 10 every single week. Cursor and Monday.com made the top 10 in 15 of those weeks. Booking.com appeared in 10 and Design.com in eight.
The report describes the advertiser landscape as being in "experimentation mode." Zapier, SAP, Aikido Security, and The Wall Street Journal are grouped among advertisers whose impression share rose and then disappeared before August 17.
Category Breakdown and the Ecommerce Opportunity
By category, B2B SaaS dominated U.S. ChatGPT ad impressions from March 30 to August 4, accounting for 19.9% of impressions across 1,210 advertisers — with Monday.com leading that segment. Retail and Consumer Brands ranked second at 10.4% across 1,510 advertisers, led by Home Depot. Graphite assigned categories for advertisers representing 98.95% of U.S. impressions.
Despite Home Depot's presence, the report notes that retail and ecommerce advertisers have been "largely absent from the platform" — a gap Graphite ties to product feeds that did not fit ChatGPT's conversational format. That could change quickly. On September 16, OpenAI named Shopify as its first ecommerce partner. On September 10, Amazon Ads launched a pilot program allowing selected U.S. advertisers to extend Amazon campaigns into ChatGPT.
The arrival of structured ecommerce ad formats changes the calculus for retail brands significantly. Marketers already familiar with ecommerce ad intelligence and competitive product feed strategies will be better positioned to move quickly once ChatGPT's shopping ad formats mature and scale. Brands that delay engagement risk ceding early positioning to competitors who begin testing now.
Rapid Geographic Expansion Adds Further Complexity
OpenAI also began rolling out ChatGPT Ads on September 23 in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and Taiwan. The platform now reports availability in more than 60 countries — a significant expansion from the nine markets covered in this report.
The pace of that rollout means the data landscape will look materially different within months. New markets bring new CTR baselines, new advertiser categories, and new user behaviours that will complicate any attempt to establish universal performance standards.
The story of ChatGPT advertising is still being written. The data suggests that non-English-speaking markets are engaging with ads at higher rates, the advertiser mix is volatile week to week, and major new distribution channels through Amazon and Shopify could reshape category performance quickly.
For marketers and business strategists, three practical implications stand out. If your campaigns are running in Brazil, Mexico, Japan, or South Korea, early CTR benchmarks suggest those markets may be more receptive to ChatGPT ads than English-speaking counterparts. The high turnover among top advertisers signals that this is still an early-mover environment — brands willing to test and iterate now may gain positioning advantages before the market matures. And the imminent arrival of ecommerce ad formats through Shopify makes this a critical moment for retail brands to monitor platform developments closely and prepare for participation.
For further reading on the evolving standards and methodologies behind AI advertising measurement, the Interactive Advertising Bureau's resource centre provides ongoing guidance on emerging digital ad formats and measurement frameworks.
