Promoting a business in ChatGPT in 2026: what you can buy and what you have to earn

Since the autumn, agencies and freelancers have been selling “promotion in ChatGPT” as a service of its own. The label can mean work to get ChatGPT to mention you in its answers, ads in ChatGPT, or products in its shopping results.

We covered the basics for a website in our GEO guide for small businesses: which crawlers to allow, how to rewrite opening paragraphs, what llms.txt and FAQs do.

# Three channels and which ones you can buy

As of 12 November 2026.

An organic mention and an ad do not substitute for each other. Ads do not enter the answer text, and a mention in the text cannot be paid for. If a contractor promises a place in the answer for money, they are either selling ads under another name or offering something they do not control.

# How ChatGPT chooses its sources

OpenAI’s help article on ChatGPT search describes several steps, and they explain why answers differ from run to run.

• The question is rewritten. ChatGPT turns the user’s question into one or more search queries and may send more to refine the answer.
• Partners handle part of the search. OpenAI says ChatGPT “sometimes partners with other search providers” and names Microsoft and Shopify among them. OpenAI’s own crawler, OAI-SearchBot, works alongside them.
• The answer depends on the user. An approximate location based on the IP address is shared with the partners, so a VPN changes the result. Saved memories can also shape how ChatGPT rewrites the query.
• Order. According to OpenAI, results are ranked by several factors and placement is not guaranteed.

A site that blocks OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt or at the CDN does not appear in ChatGPT’s search answers. A link to it may still show up as a navigational link, OpenAI says, but not as a source for the answer.

Articles about ChatGPT promotion often say that “ChatGPT is Bing” and quote shares such as 87% without a source. Microsoft is indeed one of the partners, but not the only one. Bing rankings help, yet they do not replace access for OpenAI’s own crawler.

# What ChatGPT cites for Ukrainian-language queries about contractors

We took ChatGPT app answers from a tracker that re-runs the same prompts on a schedule. The sample: 1,197 answers to 110 Ukrainian-language prompts about digital services (websites, mobile apps, SEO and advertising, AI implementation, GEO), on 17 check dates from 5 October to 12 November 2026.

• Links are almost always there. Links appeared in 91% of answers; the median was five per answer.
• Directories and rankings. At least one directory (Clutch, GoodFirms, IT-Rating and others) or ranking page appeared in 40–43% of all answers. For “who should I hire” questions the share was 50–53%, for questions about price 32–33%, and for “how”, “what” or “whether” questions 26–31%.
• Clutch is cited most often. It accounted for 6% of all links and appeared in 24% of answers.
• Russian-language pages are almost absent. Of all links, 43% went to .ua domains, and only 5 of 6,676 to pages with /ru/ in the path.
• Answers are unstable. We compared 1,019 pairs of consecutive runs of the same prompt. The median share of source domains they had in common was 20%. In 86% of pairs fewer than half the domains matched, and in 24% none did.

What a company selling services to other businesses can do:

1. Directory profiles. A complete profile on Clutch or GoodFirms with reviews from real clients, and profiles in industry directories in your market. We would not buy reviews: it breaks directory rules, and a profile built that way is easy to lose.
2. Reviews and rankings in your niche. If you are in none of them, appearing in answers to “who should I hire” is harder.
3. A Ukrainian version of your service pages. For Ukrainian-language prompts, ChatGPT in our sample almost never linked to Russian-language page versions.

Limits of this data. These are prompts about digital services for businesses. For restaurants, clinics or online shops the picture may differ. We identified directories and rankings by a list of sites and by page address and title, so the figures are a range of two recounts, a stricter one and a looser one. Kompanion publishes company rankings itself, so we are not neutral on the point about rankings. Test it on your own queries.

# Ads: what is known as of 12 November

On 21 October 2026 OpenAI expanded ads to 26 more countries, 89 in total, Ukraine among them. According to OpenAI, ads are separate from the answer, do not influence it and are clearly labelled.

Who sees the ads. Only users on the free plan and Go. Plus, Pro and Enterprise remain ad-free, dev.ua reports. If your clients use a company ChatGPT plan, the ads will not reach them.

How to buy. Through the self-serve Ads Manager or through OpenAI’s technology partners. PPC Land describes how it works in the US:

• the pilot began in February 2026 with pay-per-impression pricing at $60 per thousand;
• on 5 May Ads Manager opened to all US businesses and added cost-per-click bidding, a pixel and a Conversions API for tracking conversions;
• campaigns are set up not with keywords but with “context hints”, descriptions of the conversation topics where an ad is relevant;
• in the August table of minimum budgets, the lowest daily floor was $25. If that floor applies to Ukraine, a minimum test costs about $750 per 30 days, roughly UAH 34,000.

What OpenAI has not said for the new markets. Billing currency, minimum budgets, ad languages (including whether ads can be written in Ukrainian), formats, and whether the advertiser must be registered in the country where ads run. In Southeast Asia, self-serve access went only to companies with a legal entity in a listed country.

Topics without ads. OpenAI’s January rules said ads would not be shown to users under 18 or next to conversations about health, mental health and politics. These restrictions were not restated for the new markets, but clinics and therapists should not count on this channel.

A crawler for landing pages. The page an ad points to is checked by OAI-AdsBot. According to OpenAI’s documentation, it may use the page content to decide when the ad is relevant, and it does not collect data for model training. If you run ads, do not block it in robots.txt or at the CDN.

Ads make sense for products and services with broad demand, if your buyers use free ChatGPT and you have at least $750 a month for a test. For medicine, therapy, and B2B niches where clients work in ChatGPT Business or Enterprise, they are unlikely to help.

# Shopping: what an online shop in Ukraine can do

On its page for merchants OpenAI says:

• shopping in ChatGPT is live for users in the US;
• merchants apply to share a product feed through a waitlist, and Ukraine is on the list of countries applications are accepted from;
• Shopify and Etsy catalogues are already integrated;
• there is no fee on purchases that start in ChatGPT, and checkout happens on the merchant’s site;
• a feed is not required if ChatGPT already crawls your site, but it gives more control over how products appear;
• a dedicated app in ChatGPT is mainly for larger merchants.

If your shop sells within Ukraine, there is no ChatGPT shopping for your customers yet. If you sell to the US, join the waitlist. Either way, product pages must be open to OAI-SearchBot, or ChatGPT will not see them.

# How to check that the promotion works

Visits to your site. OpenAI’s FAQ for publishers said ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to its links. The page has since been removed, so the link goes to a Web Archive copy from 4 October 2026. In Google Analytics 4 these visits show up under the source chatgpt.com, and since 13 May 2026 also in a separate AI Assistant channel.

Services that show answers through the OpenAI API tag links differently: all 12,942 links from API answers that we checked for May to October 2026 carried utm_source=openai. Look for both sources in your reports.

Server logs. OAI-SearchBot crawls the site for search. ChatGPT-User visits when a page is opened at a user’s request and, according to OpenAI’s documentation, does not decide inclusion in search. ChatGPT-User visits show that your pages are being read during conversations.

Mentions in answers. One check proves nothing, because answers are unstable. A simple measurement routine:

1. Write down 20–30 prompts your clients use to look for your service, and keep them fixed.
2. Run each prompt 3–5 times per period from one location without a VPN, in a temporary chat or logged out, so memory has no effect.
3. Count the share of answers that mention you or link to your site, not just “yes or no”.
4. Record the date, the exact prompt, the interface and a screenshot.

API answers differ from answers in the app, so compare measurements only within one interface.

Done by hand, 25 prompts with four runs each add up to a hundred checks a month in ChatGPT alone, which is why measurement is often handed to trackers. Answerly Tracker takes answers from the ChatGPT app (not the API), as well as from Perplexity, AI Overviews and AI Mode, and shows the number of prompts and the margin of error next to every rate. The Starter plan costs $29 a month and covers about 25 prompts weekly on four engines; 1,000 trial credits are available to start. Otterly also costs from $29 a month, with 15 prompts on the Lite plan.

# ChatGPT is not the only assistant in Ukraine

According to StatCounter, in August 2026 ChatGPT sent 75% of referrals from AI chatbots to websites in Ukraine. In October Gemini took the lead, 58% against 32%. Gemini draws on Google Search, so ordinary SEO matters more for it. If you pay only for ChatGPT and do not check Gemini, you are watching a smaller share of referrals than you think.

# If you hand promotion to a contractor

What to ask for before the start:

• a list of prompts used to measure results, agreed with you;
• a “before” measurement following the routine above, as rates;
• the interface: app or API, logged in or not, which country;
• access to a report with the answers themselves, not only the summary numbers;
• a monthly list of work done: which pages changed, which directories and reviews you now appear in;
• a separate line for ads, because the contractor’s fee and the ad budget are different money.

Warning signs:

• a promise of “first place” or “top of ChatGPT”, although OpenAI itself says placement is not guaranteed;
• “we will teach ChatGPT about your brand” via GPTBot or llms.txt: GPTBot collects text for model training and does not affect search, and we found no operator confirming that llms.txt is used when choosing sources;
• buying reviews, forum mentions or networks of sites.

What it costs. Based on prices we collected on agency sites for our GEO agencies in Ukraine ranking on 26 October 2026, a monthly package starts at UAH 4,000 at Compas (about $90), UAH 25,000 at Webpromo (about $550) and $600 at Chyzh Agency. Dollar conversions use the NBU rate of 12 November 2026 (UAH 45.32 per USD). The ChatGPT ad budget comes on top.

# Methodology

• We read OpenAI’s documentation, the merchant page and the coverage of ads on 12 November 2026, and the FAQ for publishers in its Web Archive copy from 4 October 2026.
• ChatGPT answers come from a tracker that re-runs the same set of prompts in the ChatGPT app: 1,197 answers, 110 Ukrainian-language prompts, 17 dates from 5 October to 12 November 2026. API answers (12,942 links between May and October 2026) were used only to check utm tags.
• A directory is a site from a list of platforms where buyers look for contractors and read reviews: Clutch, GoodFirms, The Manifest, DesignRush, IT-Rating and others. A ranking is a page whose address contains top, rating, рейтинг, best and similar words. The looser recount also counted these words in the page title. Hence the ranges.
• Stability is the share of shared domains (Jaccard index) between two consecutive runs of the same prompt.

# See also

• GEO Optimization 2026: how a small business gets into AI answers without a budget
• GEO agencies in Ukraine 2026: six firms ranked on public evidence
• Free GEO website audit 2026: 11 AI search readiness checks ranked
• ChatGPT for Business 2026: When the $20/Month Plan Pays Off (and When It Doesn’t)