ChatGPT Ads glossary: 55 terms every merchant should know, from oppref to OAI-AdsBot

This glossary defines the terms a merchant meets when advertising or selling through ChatGPT: the Ads Manager structure, bidding and billing, the Measurement Pixel and Conversions API (oppref, event_id, deduplication, validate_only, order_created), the OpenAI product feed, and OpenAI’s crawlers. Every definition paraphrases OpenAI’s own documentation, linked in the sources.

Terms are grouped by theme rather than by letter, because they make more sense next to their neighbors. Each entry is short enough to quote, and links to the article that explains it in depth. Where OpenAI publishes a number (a limit, a window, a size), it is given; where it does not, the entry says nothing rather than guess.

The ten terms to know first

ChatGPT Ads: where and to whom

ChatGPT Ads

OpenAI’s advertising product, which shows sponsored placements inside ChatGPT. OpenAI states that ads do not influence ChatGPT’s answers. Setup is covered in how to advertise on ChatGPT.

Sponsored placement

The ad itself, shown below the end of a ChatGPT response, labeled as sponsored and visually separated from the answer (Help Center).

Free and Go plans

The ChatGPT plans whose users can see ads. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu users do not, and OpenAI does not show ads to accounts identified as belonging to people under 18.

Ads personalization

A user setting. When it is on, OpenAI can use select signals from the user’s broader ChatGPT experience, in addition to the current conversation, to choose ads (Help Center basics).

Ads Manager

OpenAI’s self-serve interface for advertisers: account, billing, campaigns, ad groups, ads, conversion setup and reporting. The advertising legal entity must be based in a country listed on the availability page.

Ad policies

The rules ads, landing pages and advertisers are reviewed against before an ad can run. Some sectors are disallowed or restricted.

Campaign structure

Campaign

The top level of an ad account. It holds the objective, the budget, the schedule, the countries, the platforms and optional custom audiences (campaign management).

Objective

What a campaign optimizes and how it is priced: views (impressions), clicks (traffic) or conversions. OpenAI advises creating a new campaign rather than switching an existing one to another objective.

Ad group

The level below a campaign. It holds the bid configuration and the context hints shared by its ads. A good ad group answers one buyer need.

Ad

What the user sees. A standard ad is a chat card with advertiser name, favicon, title, copy, image and landing page.

Product feed campaign

A campaign type that builds ads from your product feed: ad groups select products through filters, and an ad template turns each product into an ad (product feeds).

Context hints

Descriptions, set per ad group, of the conversations, topics or needs where your products are relevant. OpenAI is explicit that hints “are not exact-match keywords”, and allows up to 2,000 per ad group (targeting).

Location targeting

Countries an ad can serve in, set with ISO country codes, as inclusions or exclusions. Product feed campaigns are limited to country-level targeting.

Platforms

The three surfaces a campaign can target: the ChatGPT iOS app, the ChatGPT Android app, and ChatGPT on the web.

Custom audience

A customer list (emails or phone numbers, or their SHA-256 versions) used to include, exclude or adjust bids. Inclusion and bid adjustment need at least 25,000 matched users; exclusion has no minimum.

Bidding, budget and billing

Auction

How ChatGPT Ads decides which ad shows and what it costs. Your bid is a ceiling; the actual price is set by the auction. Costs are explained in how much ChatGPT Ads costs.

CPM

Cost per thousand impressions. The pricing basis of the views objective and a reporting metric.

CPC

Cost per click. The pricing basis of the clicks objective, and also how conversion campaigns are billed: per valid click.

CPA

Cost per acquisition. In a conversion campaign, the bid you set is a target CPA (conversion-optimized campaigns); in reporting, cpa is the cost per conversion you actually paid.

Maximize results

The default bid strategy for eligible new ad groups: OpenAI sets bids to get as many results as possible from the budget. It “does not guarantee delivery against a specific CPA, CPC, ROAS, or other cost-efficiency target” (Help Center).

Fixed bid

The alternative strategy: you set and adjust the maximum bid yourself.

Bid multiplier

A factor between 0.1x and 10x that an ad group applies to the bid for users in a custom audience.

Daily budget

An average over seven days, not a hard daily cap: spend can reach twice the daily amount on one day but not more than seven times it over the week, which runs Sunday to Saturday in the account’s time zone (daily budgets).

Postpay billing

How self-serve accounts pay: spend accrues and is charged when it reaches the account’s payment threshold, or at month end. OpenAI’s example threshold is $25; it can rise over time (billing).

Measurement and conversion tracking

oppref

The click identifier OpenAI appends to the landing URL when a user clicks an ad. It is the link between the click and what happens on your site. Capturing it is the subject of where stores lose ChatGPT signal.

__oppref cookie

The first-party cookie in which OpenAI’s Measurement Pixel stores oppref, for 30 days, so events later in the visit carry it.

Measurement Pixel

“A browser SDK for measuring website events that can be attributed to ads in ChatGPT” (Measurement Pixel). Also called the OAIQ pixel, after its oaiq JavaScript function.

Image tag

A pixel-free way to send an event by loading an image URL, for pages where scripts cannot run. It deduplicates with the Conversions API the same way (image tag).

Conversions API

OpenAI’s server-to-server endpoint for events. You POST batches of up to 1,000 events, authenticated with a key, under a Pixel ID (reference). Compared with the pixel in OAIQ pixel vs Conversions API.

Standard events

The event names OpenAI defines, such as page_viewed, contents_viewed, items_added, checkout_started, order_created, lead_created, registration_completed, subscription_created and trial_started. A conversion campaign optimizes toward one of them.

order_created

The standard purchase event, carrying the order amount and currency. It feeds attributed sales and ROAS in reporting.

event_id

The identifier of one action. The pixel calls it event_id, the Conversions API calls it id; the same value on both copies makes them one event.

Deduplication

How OpenAI counts an action once when it arrives twice. It matches on Pixel ID, event name and event ID, keeps the first copy and ignores later ones.

validate_only

A Conversions API flag that makes OpenAI validate a batch without saving it. Useful to test a payload before real orders are at stake.

Event timestamp window

A Conversions API event must be timestamped within the last 7 days and no more than 10 minutes in the future, which leaves room to replay after a short outage.

Minor units

How amounts are sent: in the currency’s smallest unit, so USD 89.00 is 8900.

SHA-256 hashing

The one-way hash applied to emails and phone numbers before they are sent to OpenAI. Raw personal data never needs to leave your systems; see server-side tracking without leaking PII.

Server-side tracking

Sending conversion events from your server rather than only from the visitor’s browser, so ad blockers and closed tabs do not lose sales. On Shopify, see how to track ChatGPT Ads conversions.

Attribution and results

Attribution window

How long after an ad interaction a conversion is credited to it. Defaults: 30 days after a click (7 or 14 are available) and 1 day after a view, which can be set to 0 (reporting).

View-through conversion

A conversion credited to an ad that was seen but not clicked, within the view window. It has no oppref, so it never appears in an order-based count.

Attributed sales

order_created_attributed_sales: the purchase value OpenAI attributes to ads, built from the amounts you send with order_created.

ROAS

Return on ad spend: attributed revenue divided by spend, reported as order_created_roas. How to measure it from your own orders is in measuring ChatGPT Ads ROAS.

Organic ChatGPT traffic

Visits from ChatGPT that did not come through an ad: a ChatGPT referrer or UTM, without oppref. It is a separate channel; see ChatGPT organic vs ChatGPT Ads.

Product feed and ChatGPT commerce

Product feed

The file describing your products for ChatGPT: one row per variant, with title, description, price, availability, images and identifiers, following OpenAI’s specification, explained in the OpenAI product feed spec.

Feed formats

Parquet (preferred, zstd compression), gzipped JSONL, CSV or TSV (file upload overview). Compared in Parquet vs JSONL vs CSV.

SFTP

The file transfer channel used to deliver full feeds to OpenAI.

Delta API

An API for sending price and availability changes between two full feed uploads.

is_eligible_search

The feed field that makes a product eligible for ChatGPT search (true) or removes it (false, which also disables checkout). OpenAI keeps the last processed record of a dropped row for up to 14 days, so setting false is the fast way out. Missing products are diagnosed in products not showing in ChatGPT shopping.

Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)

“An open standard for programmatic commerce flows between buyers, AI agents, and businesses”, developed by Stripe and OpenAI under the Apache 2.0 license (agenticcommerce.dev).

Agentic Checkout Spec

The specification merchants implement to integrate with OpenAI’s checkout flow (OpenAI commerce).

Delegated Payment Spec

The specification payment service providers implement to handle and secure agentic commerce transactions.

OpenAI crawlers

OAI-SearchBot

The crawler that surfaces websites in ChatGPT search results. Blocking it keeps your pages out of ChatGPT search; setup is in OAI-SearchBot and robots.txt.

OAI-AdsBot

The crawler “used to validate the safety of web pages submitted as ads on ChatGPT” (OpenAI crawlers). A landing page it cannot reach cannot be reviewed.

GPTBot

The crawler that collects content to improve OpenAI’s foundation models. Independent of OAI-SearchBot: you can block one and allow the other.

ChatGPT-User

The agent used when a person asks ChatGPT to open a page. It is not an automatic crawler, and OpenAI notes that robots.txt rules may not apply to it.

How Convrail fits

Convrail handles the tracking side of this glossary for Shopify and WooCommerce stores: it captures oppref, sends order_created through the Conversions API with a stable event ID so each sale is counted once, and hashes personal data with SHA-256 before anything is sent to OpenAI (tracking). It also validates the product feed before delivery and attributes each paid order to ChatGPT Ads or organic ChatGPT (attribution). Plans are on the pricing page.