OpenAI is launching an ad carousel.
The format, which has been seen via screenshots and verified by Digiday, shows a product carousel that allows multiple products to appear within a single ChatGPT ad placement, at the bottom of a user’s conversation — the same way a typical single product ad would appear.
The update comes just three months after the platform initially made it easier for e-commerce companies to run ads on ChatGPT. At the time, OpenAI enabled automation to allow retailers to bulk create “product feed” campaigns from their product catalogues, rather than build them one by one. The format itself was designed to stack ads side-by-side, opening up the opportunity for carousel placements.
A product carousel is a notable step forward for OpenAI, which for the past five months, has largely relied on a single ad format that features a headline, short description, an image and a link. The ads sit at the bottom of users’ conversations, clearly labelled as ads.
Product carousels work similarly to Google’s Shopping feed. Rather than asking brands to create individual ad units, OpenAI can pull product information directly from retailers’ feeds, and decide which products to display side-by-side in a more shoppable format. The decision, at least currently, over whether to show a single product ad or carousel sits within OpenAI’s ad platform itself, rather than an advertiser choosing one option over the other, suggesting that OpenAI’s internal systems are making those decisions in the same way it decides which ads are served in general.
Until now, a ChatGPT ad has meant one advertiser, one product. The new carousel breaks that mold. Right now it only shows items from a single retailer, but the mechanics are already built for more: think multiple products surfaced together by relevance, and eventually competing retailers side by side in the same carousel. That’s the shopping experience users already know from everywhere else.
The timing makes sense. Advertisers are already gearing up for the holidays, and Q4 is the biggest quarter of the year for ad spend. Ship the format now and it could help steer more ad dollars into the business.
“I am starting to hear more from OpenAI that they’re providing more direction and a little bit more guidance to advertisers now around doing those new types of feed-based ads,” said one U.S. agency exec, whose clients have been part of the ad pilot both directly since the early days, as well as others via an OpenAI adtech partner. “Q4 is coming, the holiday shopping season is coming, so OpenAI wants to make sure that these products are discoverable in ChatGPT conversations.”
Like every other media owner, Q4 will be important for OpenAI. It’s long been reported that OpenAI has hefty ad revenue targets to hit between now and 2030, with the company reportedly setting itself a target of $2.5 billion in ad revenue for 2026, rising 40 times to over $100 billion by 2030.
“Q4 is going to be a key period for them,” said Adthena’s CMO Ashley Fletcher. “The rest of Q3 [2026] looks like it’ll be about scale, more advertisers, more ads. It looks like people are gradually spending more and more. But I think there’ll be even more pressure in Q4 because advertisers will be planning [budgets] for 2027, and questioning how much they need in this engine to plan for the full year.”
OpenAI did not respond to Digiday’s request for comment.
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