Open ChatGPT in Europe on Monday and, if you’re on the free plan, you may notice something new sitting near the answers: an advertisement. As of 24 August, OpenAI is switching on ChatGPT Ads across 31 European markets — the company’s biggest advertising expansion yet — six months after it began quietly testing the idea in the United States. Free and Go users are in; anyone paying for Plus, Pro or Enterprise is not.
Answer first, because the shape of this matters more than the noise. This is the moment the “free” AI assistant becomes an ad-supported one for most of Europe, and the detail that will catch people out is the opt-out. You can turn off ad personalisation — which changes which ads you see — but you cannot turn off the ads. The only switch that removes them is a paid subscription. To OpenAI’s credit, it has been unusually careful about the privacy design, and we’ll give it that in full. But “free, with ads you can only escape by paying” is a different deal from the one most people signed up to, and it deserves to be read slowly.
We like a lot of what OpenAI ships, and an ad-funded free tier is a defensible way to keep a genuinely expensive product free. The questions worth asking are narrower: how honest is the opt-out, how private is the targeting really, and what happens the day an advertiser’s interests and your question quietly diverge.
