OpenAI has quietly added new references to an ads system in the latest beta version of its ChatGPT Android app, signaling the company’s plans to introduce advertising for the first time in its mobile product. By analyzing the 1.2025.329 beta APK, new strings mentioning “ads feature,” “bazaar content,” “search ad,” and “search ads carousel” appear for the first time. These additions suggest active development of a feature set for showing ads, likely focused on search, shopping, and recommendation scenarios rather than within every user conversation.
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— Tibor Blaho (@btibor91) November 29, 2025
The presence of “search ads carousel” and “bazaar content” hints at marketplace-style product displays, likely surfacing sponsored or commercial cards alongside organic responses when users request product recommendations or perform shopping queries. This follows a pattern set by Google’s AI Overviews and Microsoft’s Copilot, which already integrate ads into generative answers for commercial topics. Perplexity’s platform is also cited as an example, embedding sponsored follow-up prompts next to regular answers.
For OpenAI, introducing ads is a logical move to help subsidize the operational costs of serving free users, especially as the platform pushes deeper into shopping and commercial guidance. This approach would likely keep premium tiers ad-free, preserving a clean experience for paying customers while monetizing at scale among free users. For the broader market, this marks another step in the convergence between AI assistants and established ad-driven search platforms, as ChatGPT adapts to models already proven by Google, Microsoft, and others. The timeline for the public rollout is not yet clear, but this code-level evidence shows the feature is moving toward implementation.
