ChatGPT Ads Turned On Auto-Bidding by Default (Reporting Still Has 2 Buckets)
OpenAI made Maximize results, its automated bid strategy, the preselected default for eligible new ChatGPT Ads ad groups in a product update to beta advertisers the week of August 17, 2026. It chases click or conversion volume within budget and, per OpenAI's documentation, does not guarantee delivery against any CPA, CPC, or ROAS target. Existing ad groups are untouched. New ones need a manual switch back to Max Bid.
That one sentence in the help centre, "prioritizes result volume and does not guarantee delivery against a specific CPA, CPC, ROAS, or other cost-efficiency target at this time," is the whole story. It is an unusually honest thing for an ad platform to print. It is also now the thing that happens to every advertiser who clicks through ad group creation without reading the Bid strategy section. Which, from what I've seen of self-serve platforms, is most of them.
Google's playbook, run in the wrong order
Google spent the better part of a decade building out reporting before it started pushing advertisers toward Smart Bidding by default. Device segmentation, search terms, auction insights, conversion lag reports, all of that existed so you could at least argue with the machine when it did something strange. Whether you trust Google's automation is a separate debate (we covered the August 17 change to how it treats overperforming CPA targets last week, and it did not exactly inspire confidence), but the measurement scaffolding was there first.
OpenAI has done it backwards. The same product update email that introduced Maximize results also added campaign-level platform targeting across three surfaces: iOS app, Android app, and Web. Reporting, meanwhile, still groups everything into two buckets, Mobile and Desktop, with mobile web lumped into Mobile. OpenAI's documentation says more detailed platform reporting "is planned," with no date. So you can now target iOS-only and have no way to see iOS-only results.
Same pattern with conversions. View-through conversions arrived this week with a fixed one-day window, and OpenAI is explicit that they're excluded from bidding, billing, CPA, and the main conversions total. Supplemental reporting only. The automation cannot see them.
So the picture is: automated bidding is on by default, it optimizes toward a conversion signal that only counts post-click events, on a channel where you can't break results out by the surfaces you're allowed to target. On paper that sounds like an upgrade. In practice, it's a black box sitting on top of a two-column spreadsheet.
What "no guarantee" costs in a second-price auction
The mechanics matter here. ChatGPT Ads runs a relevance-weighted second-price auction, and Manual: Max Bid was, until this week, the only way to set a hard ceiling on what a click could cost you. Maximize results removes that ceiling by design. It will bid whatever it needs to bid to spend the budget on results.
On a mature channel with deep inventory, that's usually fine, because the market sets a reasonable clearing price and the automation learns fast. ChatGPT Ads is not that yet. PPC Land's reporting puts CPMs at roughly $60 at launch and down to about $25 by mid-April, and the minimum spend went from $200,000-plus in the pilot to $50,000 in April to zero in May. Prices have moved a lot in six months, inventory is thin relative to Meta or Google, and a wave of new self-serve advertisers is arriving. That is a volatile auction to hand an uncapped bidder.
The analogy I keep landing on: Maximize results on a brand-new ad group is like telling a broker "buy as many shares as you can with this money" on a stock that listed six months ago and doesn't publish quarterly numbers yet. You'll get shares. You will not know if you paid a sane price until much later, and by then the budget is gone.
And honestly, the bigger problem isn't even the bidding. It's that most advertisers on this channel have no benchmark to judge the automation against. OpenAI's own guidance, as PPC Land's write-up of the change notes, has been a starting max CPC of $3 to $5 for clicks campaigns. If you've never run a manual ad group at that bid, you have no idea whether the $7.40 CPC Maximize results produces is the machine finding high-intent users or the machine overpaying in a thin auction. Both look identical in a two-metric report.
Worth remembering how early this all is. When r/PPC ran an informal three-account ChatGPT Ads test back in May, the cleanest brand in the group drew a 0% CTR. The channel has improved since (OpenAI's later conversation-hint targeting pulled CTRs closer to 0.91% in the data we looked at in July), but the spread between accounts is still wide. Wide spreads are exactly when you want a manual baseline.
The four-minute opt-out, and the 14-day test I'd run instead
If you're creating new ad groups in ChatGPT Ads Manager this week, the switch is in the ad group's Bid strategy section. Maximize results will be preselected. Change it to Manual: Max Bid before you save. That's the whole opt-out. Four minutes if you're slow.
What I'd actually do with the next two weeks:
Run the new ad group on Manual: Max Bid at $4 CPC (the middle of OpenAI's recommended range) for 14 days. Log three numbers daily: average CPC, CTR, and cost per conversion. Those are your benchmarks. They did not exist before this test, and they're the only thing that lets you evaluate the automation later.
Then, on day 15, duplicate the ad group, same creative, same budget, same targeting, and switch the duplicate to Maximize results. Run both side by side for another 14 days.
The benchmark I'd use: if the Maximize results group delivers more conversions at a cost per conversion within 15% of the manual group, keep it on and let it run. If its cost per conversion is 30% or more worse, go back to manual and revisit in a quarter. Anything in between is a judgment call, and I'd lean manual for now, mostly because you can't see where the extra spend is going.
One more thing to check before any of this, and I realize I'm burying it: automatic advanced matching became the default on existing web pixels on August 17, after a ten-day opt-out window. If your conversion-goal campaigns are suddenly reporting different numbers this week, that's probably why, and it will also change what Maximize results is optimizing toward. Confirm your pixel or Conversions API is firing the way you expect before you trust any automated bid decision built on it.
Put differently:
Without a manual baseline to compare against, Maximize results is just a budget with no brakes.
Why OpenAI flipped the default now
The timing seems fairly obvious to me. Two days after the bidding email, OpenAI announced ChatGPT Ads is expanding to 31 European countries, its largest geographic expansion so far, with self-serve access through Ads Manager "later this summer." Search Engine Land's coverage of the expansion lists Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and the Nordics among the named markets. OpenAI says tens of thousands of marketers have already advertised on ChatGPT.
Defaults exist for the advertisers who never open the settings. When you're about to onboard a large wave of small businesses in 31 new markets, most of whom have never bid in a ChatGPT auction and have no idea what $4 a click buys, a default that spends their budget reliably is a better product decision than one that leaves half their ad groups underdelivering on a bid they set too low. From OpenAI's side, I'd probably do the same thing. It keeps revenue predictable and support tickets down.
From the advertiser's side, it's a tax on not reading the screen. Jon Loomer's walkthrough of the same update also notes new placement controls and URL parameters shipping in the same release, which tells you the product team is moving fast on control surfaces. The reporting team, for whatever reason, isn't keeping pace.
My prediction, and I'll put a number on it: by the end of Q4 2026, OpenAI adds a target-CPA or target-ROAS style option to sit alongside Maximize results, because "we do not guarantee delivery against a cost-efficiency target" is not a sentence that survives contact with European procurement teams. Until then, every dollar you put into Maximize results is helping OpenAI train the model that eventually makes those targets possible. You're welcome to do that. I'd just want to be doing it on purpose, with a manual baseline to compare against, rather than because a radio button was already filled in.
Treat the default like a suggestion
I don't think Maximize results is a bad product. Volume-first automation is the right call for a lot of accounts eventually, and it will probably be the right call here once the reporting catches up and the auction settles. I'm just not convinced this week is "eventually." The platform is six months old, it reports on two device buckets, and it told you in writing it won't hold a cost target. The teams that come out of this phase with usable data are probably the ones who ran manual first, wrote the numbers down, and then let the machine try to beat them. That's a slower way to spend money. For now, it seems to be the only way to know what you bought.
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