Since August 24, 2026, you’ve been able to advertise within ChatGPT in the Netherlands. It’s the kind of news that spreads across your entire timeline within a week, with just as many success stories as doomsday scenarios. We first looked into what’s actually available, what it costs, and for whom it already makes financial sense. Short answer: for most Dutch companies, this isn’t yet a channel worth allocating budget to, but it is the clearest signal yet that your visibility in AI responses is now worth money. In this blog, you’ll learn exactly what is and isn’t possible, why the situation is different for B2B than for B2C, and what we’re advising our clients this month.
What exactly went live on August 24
OpenAI has rolled out ChatGPT Ads in 31 European markets, including the Netherlands (OpenAI). This marks the channel’s arrival in Europe about half a year after the initial U.S. test. Ads appear below ChatGPT’s response, are labeled as “sponsored,” and are visually distinct from the response itself. They are not visible to everyone: only users on the free version and the Go plan can see them. Users on the Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, or Edu plans will not see them. Users under the age of 18 are excluded.
More important than the news itself is the fine print: you can’t yet advertise independently in Europe. There is no self-service environment yet. Purchasing is handled through OpenAI’s Ads Solutions team, through agency partners, or through technology partners, and signing up at ads.openai.com does not guarantee access. So anyone who says they’ll start tomorrow is, in practice, booking a meeting with a sales team—not a campaign.
Where You Can Shop on Your Own, and Where You Can't
It’s worth distinguishing between these two things, because they’re constantly being confused. “ChatGPT Ads is available in the Netherlands” means that Dutch users will see ads. It doesn’t mean that you can enable those ads yourself.
You can currently run your own campaigns through Ads Manager in nine markets: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, and Mexico. Only in those markets can you open an account and launch a campaign without an intermediary (OpenAI Help Center).
The European rollout covers 31 countries: the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Ireland, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, and Malta. In all of these countries, users will see the ads, but ad buying will be handled by OpenAI’s Ads Solutions team, through agency partners, or through technology partners. OpenAI announced that self-service will be available in Europe later this summer, though no specific date was given.
For a Dutch company, there are essentially three options: wait until Ads Manager becomes available here, start buying ads now through a partner—with the associated minimum spending requirements—or advertise through an entity in one of those nine markets. We’re seeing that third option emerge in the market, but targeting is still limited to the country where you’re purchasing ads, so it’s rarely the quickest route.
Two formats, and why that distinction matters
There are currently two types of ads, and they immediately reveal what kind of business this channel is designed for:
- Product ads with an image, title, and price. You're familiar with the Google Shopping format: a card featuring a specific product and a specific price.
- Service and accommodation listings with an image, headline, and description, possibly displayed as a carousel with multiple options side by side.
You can bid on a CPM, CPC, or conversion-optimized CPC basis. You can target by country, work with custom audiences, and specify your own context hints. Measurement is done via UTM parameters, the OpenAI pixel, a Conversions API, and third-party measurement. The estimated cost per click in the Netherlands is around 2 to 3 euros, while OpenAI itself cites 3 to 5 dollars (Frankwatching). For a new channel, that’s not a shocking amount, but it’s not a bargain either.
From Keyword to Conversation
The real change isn't in the format but in the connection. You don't bid on a keyword. Your ad is matched to the topic of the conversation. That difference is bigger than it sounds, because it shifts your presence to a different point in the customer journey.
On Google, you appear the moment someone has already condensed their question into three words. In ChatGPT, you appear while someone is still formulating their question: “What’s a good alternative to X?”, “What should I look for if I want to buy Y?”, “Which company can do this in the Rotterdam area?” That’s the exploration phase, not the point of purchase. For those accustomed to evaluating their ads based on last-click conversions, this is a tricky position to be in, and that’s exactly why we’re cautious about it: the channel influences a decision that’s finalized later, elsewhere, and through a different path.
The figures that should shape the discussion
There are a lot of numbers being thrown around about AI search that no one can back up. We stick to three that are verifiable.
First, the volume. AI platforms currently account for 0.32 percent of all website traffic. That’s sixteen times as much as in 2024, but still only a fraction of your total. However, visitors coming from an AI response do tend to stay noticeably longer: an average of 9 minutes and 19 seconds, compared to 5 minutes and 33 seconds from regular organic search—a 68 percent increase. This finding comes from an analysis by SE Ranking of 101,000 websites.
Second, conversion. Orbit Media analyzed GA4 data from 97 B2B and lead-generation websites across 28.9 million sessions between July 2025 and June 2026. Traffic from ChatGPT converted into an inquiry in 2.08 percent of cases, compared to 0.71 percent for regular organic Google traffic (Orbit Media). The researchers themselves are candid about the limitations: the pattern holds true for about two-thirds of the sites, not all of them, and the classification of conversions varies by site.
Third, adoption in the Netherlands. In 2025, 39 percent of Dutch residents aged 18 and older had used AI in the previous three months to create text, images, or videos, compared to 23 percent a year earlier. Among businesses, usage varies sharply by size: 59.2 percent of companies with 500 or more employees use AI technology, compared with 17.8 percent of companies with 10 to 19 employees (CBS).
That last breakdown is the most interesting figure in the entire list for B2B. It is precisely the large organizations—where the procurement processes and budgets are concentrated—that have already integrated AI into their daily operations. So your decision-maker is already part of that conversation, even if that conversation is currently generating hardly any measurable traffic.
And then there’s the figure you can’t find anywhere in hard data. There’s a lot of talk about “a third of all searches already go through AI.” We haven’t seen any evidence to support that claim, so we don’t use it. What is true, however, is that traffic from Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode simply ends up in the “organic search” category in GA4. The actual share of AI-influenced search queries is therefore higher than what you see in your statistics, but no one can say exactly how much higher. That’s a reason to get your measurement in order—not to make up a number.
B2C: This will be the first to be calculated
If you sell products to consumers, this channel is remarkably well-suited to you. You have an image, a price, and inventory—and that’s exactly what this product format requires. Your buyer is using ChatGPT to compare options rather than checking out, which is a bummer for your last-click report but works just fine as long as the rest of your funnel is in order. And a cost-per-click of 2 to 3 euros is a figure you can test: compare it to your margin per order, and you’ll know within an afternoon if it’s feasible.
Three things determine whether this will work for you. Your product feed must be accurate, because without up-to-date prices and inventory, you’ll end up with an ad that doesn’t deliver on its promises. You need to be able to view AI referrals separately in your analytics; otherwise, you’ll attribute the results to the wrong channel. And you have to accept that the first few weeks of this channel will be more expensive than the weeks that follow, because there’s no bid history or benchmarks yet.
B2B: The Profit Isn't in the Ad
If you’re selling a service, an implementation, or software to other companies, our advice is more down-to-earth. This format isn’t a good fit for your sales process. A product card with a price says little about a decision-making process that takes six months, involves four decision-makers, and culminates in a conversation. Your buyer uses ChatGPT to create a long list and refine their own requirements—not to make a purchase.
That’s not bad news, because it’s precisely during that long-list phase that you gain ground without paying for clicks. Anyone mentioned in the answer itself will still be there tomorrow. Anyone who buys their spot there will lose it as soon as the budget runs out. For B2B, the benefit therefore lies in becoming quotable: your own figures, real-world case studies, and explanations that can’t be summarized from ten other sources. We’ve previously outlined what Google says does and doesn’t work in this context, including the GEO myths you can safely ignore.
What about the other AI tools? Not everyone wants ads
People who are currently developing an AI advertising strategy often do so as if every platform follows the same path. That's not what happens.
Google has gone the furthest and is the least exciting: there are ads in AI Overviews and in AI Mode, purchased through the campaign types you’re already familiar with. Microsoft Copilot serves ads through Microsoft Advertising, so there, too, it’s more of an extension of existing ad buying than a new channel.
On the other hand, there are two parties that have deliberately chosen not to go down that path. On February 4, 2026, Anthropic publicly stated that Claude would remain ad-free: no sponsored links alongside the conversation and no product placements in responses. The reasoning behind this is remarkably substantive. According to Anthropic, a conversation with an AI assistant is fundamentally different from a search query because you share personal context, and ads that influence the answer make it impossible to tell whether a recommendation has a commercial motive (Anthropic). Perplexity arrived at the same conclusion through a different approach: it tested ads and then discontinued them because even a clearly labeled sponsored placement casts doubt on the objectivity of the response (Search Engine Land).
For your own planning, this is a more important factor than it seems. Business users often subscribe to paid plans and use the ad-free versions of the assistants. That’s exactly where you can’t buy anything, and the only way to be featured in the answer is to prove that your source is good enough to be cited. One tactic works on all five platforms, and that is not to advertise.
What This Means for AI Search and GEO
There’s a pattern in this news that goes beyond a single advertising product. Every search channel that becomes major follows the same sequence: first there’s organic space, then advertising space appears, and after that, the organic space gradually shrinks. It took Google two decades to go through this process. With AI-powered answers, this happens faster, simply because the revenue model is already built in rather than being added later.
What does that mean in practical terms? It means that the period during which you can appear in AI answers for free is limited, and that it’s currently underway. We see this as a reason to invest in organic reach right now, rather than allocating an advertising budget. A position in the answer that you earn through your own expertise cannot be outbid by a competitor with a larger budget. A position you buy, however, can be.
That’s also why we pay such close attention to this ourselves. We continue to monitor the market around us and advise our clients on what’s possible, because the opportunities change every quarter. But our focus remains on sustainable, organic growth—without relying on bidding strategies, click prices, or algorithm changes that are beyond your control. Advertising is a tool, not a foundation. You can read more about our thoughts on this in our vision on AI.
What We're Doing for Our Customers This Month
Specifically, and in this order:
- Set up your tracking. Separate AI referrals in GA4 and in the reports so that in three months you’ll have a clear trend rather than just a hunch. Without this, you won’t be able to make any conclusions later on about whether this channel had any impact.
- Increase citability. Provide answers to the questions your customers actually ask, using your own data and concrete examples, and a structure that both visitors and analysts can understand.
- Clean up product feeds for online stores, because that’s a prerequisite for the product format, and it’s already delivering better results in Shopping today.
- Set aside a testing budget, but don’t spend it. We’ll determine now what amount and which target audience we’ll test as soon as self-service launches, so you can go live within a week instead of within a quarter.
- Don't take anything away from what works. Don't cut a single euro from a campaign that's performing well, or a single hour from content that's ranking well. A test is funded based on available resources, not on results.
In a nutshell
The ads have been rolling out in the Netherlands since August 24, but you can’t buy ad space here yet: on OpenAI’s own list, the Netherlands is marked as “Coming Soon,” just like the other 30 European countries. And it’s not a given that every AI assistant will become an advertising channel: Claude and Perplexity deliberately keep their responses ad-free. For e-commerce sites, this will be a viable testing ground as soon as that changes, with a cost-per-click you can evaluate against your margin. For B2B, it’s currently a reason to work harder on your organic positioning in AI responses, because that’s where your buyer is already. And for everyone: make sure you can measure it before you start reporting on it.
Would you like to know where your company stands right now in terms of AI-powered responses, and which of these five steps would be most beneficial for you? We’d be happy to review this with you—without requiring you to set aside an advertising budget right away. Get in touch, and we’ll schedule a half-hour session to go over your situation.
