ChatGPT Ads Roll Out in Taiwan, but Not for Supplements or Law Firms

本文另有中文版：ChatGPT 廣告在台灣陸續開放：保健食品、法律服務不能投

On September 23, 2026, OpenAI said ChatGPT Ads would begin rolling out in Taiwan, one of seven Asian markets in the announcement. The rules on who may buy them in health, finance and law sit in a Help Center table with only two country columns: US and All Other Countries.

Taiwan is not the US, so it falls under the All Other Countries column. There, dietary supplements and legal services are Not allowed, and deposit accounts and non-health insurance are Restricted to Select Approved Advertisers.

Businesses outside those three areas will find no category rules on these pages. What every self-serve advertiser does face is a review queue, which OpenAI says it cannot expedite.

The eligibility table has two columns, and the one outside the US is far stricter

The table is called the Ads Policy Eligibility Table for Highly Regulated Areas. It sits at the bottom of OpenAI’s help page on onboarding and policy problems and covers health, financial services and legal services. Taiwan is named in the announcement and on the Ads Manager availability list, but not in this table.

With only two columns and Taiwan outside the US, Taiwan falls under All Other Countries. That follows from the column names. OpenAI has not published a ruling specific to Taiwan.

The table also does not say whether US refers to the advertiser or to the audience. A troubleshooting message points toward the audience. It tells advertisers whose ads cannot serve in a selected country to compare the campaign’s target countries with the allowed categories.

For an advertiser and an audience that are both in Taiwan, either reading lands on All Other Countries. The two only diverge across borders, as when a company based in Taiwan advertises to US users, or a company based in the US advertises to Taiwan users.

Nine rows show how the two columns can differ.

Source: OpenAI Help Center, “Troubleshooting Common Onboarding and Policy issues,” snapshot of September 24, 2026.

The full table tells the same story. In the All Other Countries column, 15 of the 16 health rows read Not allowed; the exception is Health software and infrastructure. Of the 18 financial rows, 11 read Not allowed, 6 read Restricted to Select Approved Advertisers, and 1, Financial software, reads Allowed. Legal services reads Not allowed.

The US column is no green light either. Of its 35 rows, 11 read Allowed, 12 read Restricted to Select Approved Advertisers and 12 read Not allowed. Legal services is Allowed there on the condition that US advertisers are licensed to practice law in the US when serving US users. Across the table, the two columns differ in 18 rows and match in 17.

Two rows have names that look close and results that are not. Health software and infrastructure is Allowed in both columns. Consumer medical devices, wearables and apps is Allowed in the US column and Not allowed in All Other Countries.

Restricted to Select Approved Advertisers is not an open door. A note above the table says OpenAI is working with a small group of advertisers and is not accepting applications for approval in certain policy categories, without saying which ones. Another passage on the same page adds that a registered or licensed business is “not automatically eligible for every advertising category or market.”

In the All Other Countries column, then, the rows land on businesses unevenly. A dietary supplement seller or a clinic offering minimally invasive cosmetic procedures would find Not allowed. A bank taking deposits or an insurer selling non-health insurance would find Restricted to Select Approved Advertisers. A law firm would find Not allowed. A company whose category is Health software and infrastructure, or Financial software, would find Allowed.

A shoe shop or a coffee roaster will not find itself in the table at all. These pages cover only the listed categories, so the table cannot be read as a list of who else may advertise, or of who may not.

Taiwanese businesses can sign up, then wait in a review queue

Account access runs on a different axis. The Ads Manager availability page lists Taiwan as Available for self-service. What counts is the country of the legal entity that will advertise and be billed. The country tied to a ChatGPT login does not override it.

So a Taiwanese entity can sign up. That does not mean every Taiwan user can already see ads, and it does not clear any category in the table. OpenAI’s troubleshooting page treats account verification, account approval, ad review and ad delivery as separate checks, and says that clearing one does not clear the rest.

On the self-serve route, each advertiser needs its own account. The details must be those of the entity that will advertise and be billed, and country, billing currency and time zone cannot be changed once the account exists. In the flow that starts inside ChatGPT, agencies cannot create advertiser accounts on a client’s behalf. A client that has created its account can invite an agency in.

Then comes the wait. Account applications go through a rolling queue. OpenAI says it cannot expedite account review or ad review at this time. Business verification, one step in the process, may take up to seven business days; if it takes longer, OpenAI asks advertisers to contact Ads Support. That figure covers verification, not the whole setup.

New accounts carry one more limit. OpenAI says some new self-serve accounts can initially advertise only in their home country. Other countries open up after identity verification is approved and the account reaches the required spend from home-country campaigns, an amount OpenAI does not publish.

Put that next to the legal-entity rule, and a foreign advertiser that wants to reach Taiwan appears to face an extra layer. Its entity must be based in a listed country, and a new account may start out limited to its home country. OpenAI does not say this directly; it is a reading of two passages.

Self-service is not the only route. The announcement names three channels besides it: OpenAI’s Ads Solutions team, agency partners and technology partners. The agency partners it names include dentsu, Havas Media, Omnicom Media, Publicis Groupe and WPP. The availability page adds that larger advertisers with more complex needs can contact the OpenAI Ads team.

TWD 60 a day is a floor, not a price

OpenAI’s Minimum Campaign Spend table lists a minimum daily budget of TWD 60 for accounts billed in Taiwan dollars. The table is organized by billing currency, not by country. The figure is a floor, not a recommended budget. It says nothing about results.

For campaigns billed per click, OpenAI recommends starting with a maximum bid of $3 to $5 USD per click. That is a suggested starting bid, not a price actually paid, and OpenAI has not published prices paid.

Ads may reach Free and Go users and logged-out visitors

For an advertiser, the user-side rules define the audience. OpenAI’s Help Center says ads may appear for users on the Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts will not have ads. OpenAI also says ads may appear only in regions where ads are being tested, and that eligible users see clear in-product information.

Logged-out use is not ad-free. OpenAI says ads shown in logged-out experiences are appropriate for all audiences, and that mature-content ads are limited to eligible logged-in users.

Some situations stay ad-free. Temporary Chats will not show ads. OpenAI says accounts identified as belonging to people under 18 do not get ads, judged from account-level age information and age prediction where available. It also says ads are not eligible to appear near personal health, mental health or political topics, and that it currently does not allow political advertising in ChatGPT.

Ads can appear below the end of a response, labeled as sponsored and visually separated from it. A response can be followed by one or more ad units. OpenAI states that ads are not integrated into responses and that they run on systems separate from the chat model. It says advertisers have no ability to shape, rank or alter ChatGPT’s responses, and that ads do not influence the answers.

Users have two controls that do different jobs. Turning off personalization changes how ads are selected, but ads still appear, based on the current chat thread. Ads-Free removes ads at a price. On the Free plan it means lower usage limits and reduced feature access, such as fewer messages and no access to some tools such as image generation or deep research.

Go is a separate case. OpenAI says Ads-Free is a Free-plan option, so a Go user would have to switch back to Free to use it, or move to a plan that is already ad-free, such as Plus or Pro.

One more detail: an ad’s language may differ from the conversation’s or the interface’s language.

Context hints describe a business in a sentence; they are not exact-match keywords

OpenAI’s own advice on writing ads begins by saying that ChatGPT “requires a different approach than keyword-based platforms.” The system picks ads from several signals: the context and intent of the current conversation, the ad’s landing page, title and copy, the advertiser’s context hints and targeting selections, and, when personalization is on, signals from the user’s wider ChatGPT use.

Context hints are short descriptions added at the ad-group level. OpenAI’s wording lets hints describe conversations, topics or keywords where a product may be relevant, and says they help guide matching. It also says they are “not exact-match keywords” and do not guarantee delivery in specific conversations.

The advice for writing one is a clear, natural phrase about a single idea, not a list of disconnected keywords. One of OpenAI’s illustrative examples for running shoes is a sentence about beginners training for a first 5K, not a search term.

Hints also do not control where an ad runs. OpenAI’s example contrasts two sentences. A hint that describes residential plumbing services available in Chicago is a business description. An instruction to show the ad only to people in Chicago is a delivery instruction, and hints cannot enforce geographic limits, schedules or exclusions.

Delivery controls live at campaign level. Target countries are required; platforms (Android app, Android web, Desktop web, iOS app and iOS web) and custom audiences are optional. Campaigns other than product-feed campaigns can also target regions, cities and postal codes. OpenAI says location availability may vary by country, and the pages do not say what Taiwan offers. New product-feed campaigns are limited to country level.

Among eligible ads, OpenAI describes a “relevance-weighted, second-price auction,” and says relevance and advertiser bids both count when it decides which ad to show first.

The landing page does double duty. OpenAI says its crawlers check pages submitted as ads for safety, and that it may also use content from the landing page to decide when the ad is most relevant to show. One Help page says OAI-AdsBot must be allowed and recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot as well; another words the rule more strongly for both bots. App-store links and pages that need a login may not give crawlers enough content to work with.

So the landing page is both a safety check and an input to matching. For a site owner, that may make preparing a page for an ad and preparing it to be crawled and understood harder to treat as separate jobs. That is an inference, not something OpenAI states. One fact cuts against it: OpenAI says ads run on systems separate from the chat model. The inference concerns the landing page as a matching signal for ads. It says nothing about ChatGPT’s answers, which OpenAI says ads do not influence.

OpenAI’s figures are global; Taiwan’s audience, prices and results are not published

Every number OpenAI gives is worldwide. It says ChatGPT Ads are now available in more than 60 countries and that tens of thousands of advertisers are running them. It also says the ads passed a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate less than 200 days after launch, a milestone it announced at the end of August. None of these figures is about Taiwan, and none shows where advertising budgets come from.

The pages do not say when the rollout in Taiwan is complete, how many Taiwan users are on Free and Go, what results advertisers get here, what clicks actually cost, or what spend unlocks other countries for a new account. Nor do they say whether advertising budgets will move to ChatGPT from other platforms. That question needs data OpenAI has not published.

Measurement exists, but it runs with delays. Ads Manager Beta currently reports impressions, clicks, spend, click-through rate, average CPC, average CPM and conversions, the last only if conversion measurement is set up. Impressions, clicks and click-through rate refresh about every 15 minutes, and spend can lag by 7 to 8 hours. OpenAI asks advertisers to allow 24 to 48 hours for attributed conversions to appear and says totals may change. It also says advertisers receive aggregated, non-identifying information, such as total views or clicks, and that new measurement solutions are coming.

The first barrier for a small Taiwan business is review and eligibility, not budget

Read together, OpenAI’s pages put two obstacles ahead of the TWD 60 daily minimum. Health, financial and legal advertisers hit the table first. In the All Other Countries column, every row except Health software and infrastructure and Financial software is either Not allowed or Restricted to Select Approved Advertisers, and some categories are not taking applications at all. Other self-serve advertisers hit the review queue, which OpenAI says it cannot expedite.

A low floor does not make an effective campaign cheap. But that question only arises once a business is through the door. This is a judgment drawn from OpenAI’s pages, not something OpenAI says.

Scope and versions

This article reflects OpenAI’s announcement and Help Center pages as of September 24, 2026. OpenAI calls the program a test, and one page says availability “may continue to evolve as testing expands.” During the test, ads do not appear in the ChatGPT Atlas browser, and the advertiser dashboard is named Ads Manager Beta. The announcement says OpenAI will keep expanding over the next few months, into new markets and with new formats, optimization tools and measurement solutions. OpenAI’s full Ads Policies text is a separate document and is not covered here; rules for industries outside the table may sit there.

Several readings above would change on new evidence:

• Taiwan reading the All Other Countries column: if OpenAI published a separate table for Taiwan, if a Taiwan-facing ad in a Not allowed category were approved, or if a rejection message cited a different rule.
• The extra layer for foreign advertisers: if a new account with a foreign legal entity can advertise in Taiwan directly in practice.
• The landing page as an input to matching: if live campaigns show that the landing page has no effect on matching.
• The closing judgment: if live campaigns turn out to be expensive to run effectively, or if reviews clear quickly. It also leans on the All Other Countries reading, so part of it falls if that reading is overturned.

This article summarizes OpenAI’s published announcement and help pages. It is not campaign or purchasing advice.