The prerequisite is not money, it is a legal entity. Without a business registered in one of the 63 countries OpenAI supports, you cannot buy ads — there is no workaround, because verification checks public records and the card must match the account's name and country.
Paperwork to prepare
- The legal name exactly as filed with the state, including the entity suffix (LLC, Inc.). It must match character for character.
- The registration number and the registered address.
- ID for the person completing verification — a passport or driver's licence may be requested, along with a liveness check.
- A card in the business's name, billing in the same currency as the account's country. A personal card will not clear the payment gate.
One easily missed detail: the brand name shown next to your ads can differ from the legal name. But changing the brand name later sends the account back to review and pauses serving — so settle it before launch. The account's country and currency are fixed at setup; changing them means a different entity and a new account.
If you have no entity: two routes, both costly
- Form a US LLC: state fees run roughly $50–500 depending on the state, Wyoming being cheapest at about $100 state fee plus about $50/year for a registered agent. An EIN is free. But opening a business bank account is much harder than it used to be, and most people end up using an intermediary or a full-service agent at $300–800.
- Go through an agency or partner that already has access. It is not free: they take a percentage of spend, usually 15–20%, and most only take you on at significant spend.
Plainly: forming an entity to run a $250–500 test is a bad cost trade, because formation and upkeep already exceed the ad budget. An entity is worth forming once another channel has proven the CR and ads are only the volume step.
The first 30 days: 4 checkpoints
- Days 1–5: run enough to clear the minimum click threshold. At $25/day and a $3–5 CPC that is 5–8 clicks a day — below ~50 clicks there is nothing to read.
- Days 6–15: read the real CTR and CPC. If the CPC is well above $5, the creative is not relevant enough; fix the creative before raising budget.
- Days 16–25: if conversions exist, compute the real cost per conversion and compare it against payout. This is where the arithmetic in the economics post gets checked against real numbers instead of assumptions.
- Days 26–30: decide. If cost per conversion exceeds payout, stop — change offer or channel, do not raise budget to "rescue" it.
Three things not to do in the first 30 days
- Do not raise budget before you know the CR. Spending more on an unmeasured CR only loses money faster.
- Do not use an affiliate link directly as the landing page. Put a content page in between — many networks reject a straight hop, and the intermediate page is also where you lift the CR.
- Do not run several offers at once on 5–8 clicks a day. Splitting a small budget across offers means no offer has enough data.
On operations: impression, click and CTR reporting refreshes about every 15 minutes, but spend figures can lag 7–8 hours — a displayed spend of zero does not mean you have not been charged. Ad-review crawlers may visit landing pages with tracking parameters, so third-party analytics may classify that as paid traffic; those are not billable clicks.
Other posts in the series: what ChatGPT Ads is, which verticals are blocked, the economics of a $3–5 CPC.
Sources: Ads in ChatGPT: The Basics, ChatGPT Ads eligibility, Advertise in ChatGPT.