ChatGPT Ads Opens to the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Turkey

OpenAI's Ads Manager availability table, updated on 16 September 2026, lists 56 countries as self-service available. Four are new: the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Turkey. A business registered in any of them can now open and verify its own ChatGPT advertiser account. Ads are also expanding to users across nine markets in the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey, and the minimum daily budget table gained Saudi and Israeli rows the same day.

Update, 24 September 2026: the advertiser list is at 63. OpenAI opened ChatGPT Ads across Southeast Asia and Taiwan on 23 September 2026, adding Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. We then read the campaign API's own allowed-country list from our account, and it returned those same 63 codes, which settled six markets this site had carried as buy-only since 2 September: Algeria, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Oman and Tunisia can all be targeted today. The list of places a business can advertise from and the list of places it can advertise to are the same list for the first time since August.

Update, 22 September 2026: OpenAI's campaign documentation now says some new self-serve accounts can at first advertise only in their home country. Other supported countries unlock once identity verification is approved and the account has reached the required spend on campaigns at home, an amount OpenAI does not publish. An advertiser in a market without confirmed serving should plan a home campaign before the cross-border one described below. Where ChatGPT ads are available.

Four new countries on the advertiser list

The list went from 52 to 56. The 31 August opening had already reached India, the 31 European markets and eleven markets in the Middle East and North Africa: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar and Tunisia. The UAE, Saudi Arabia and Israel were the absences people asked about most, and Turkey was not on the list at all.

OpenAI's advertiser email put it in one line: Ads Manager "is now available to advertisers based in the Middle East". The availability page carries the country-level answer, and its note is the rule that decides eligibility: "the legal entity that will advertise and be billed must be based in a country listed as available".

The same two limits apply as everywhere else. Ads Manager is a beta, and it opens to advertisers in approved categories whose ads clear policy review.

Where ads reach users

Buying and serving are separate lists, and in this region they still differ.

OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT Ads across nine markets in the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey, the nine in the first two rows. Israel is the notable split: Israeli businesses can buy, and OpenAI has not announced when ads will start appearing to Israeli users. An Israeli account can still run campaigns into every market where ads serve.

The minimum daily budgets

OpenAI's Create Campaigns article publishes a minimum per billing currency. The Gulf and Israel rows, as of 17 September 2026:

The dirham row was 70 AED in early September, before the UAE was on the availability table, and it is 65 now. There is no Turkish lira row yet, and none for the Kuwaiti dinar, Bahraini dinar, Omani rial or Egyptian pound. The table now covers 23 currencies.

What a business in the region decides first

The account country and the billing currency are fixed when the account is created and cannot be changed afterwards. For a group with companies in Dubai, Riyadh and Doha, that makes the entity choice the first decision, ahead of creative or budget: the entity that verifies owns the account, pays in its own currency and can target any serving market from there.

Targeting is set per campaign. A Saudi account can reach users in the UAE, Europe or the US, and a UAE account can reach Saudi users. Campaigns target at country level everywhere outside the US.

Our country pages carry the detail for the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and where ChatGPT Ads are available keeps the full list with a dated log of every change.

The UAE answer, two weeks early

On 2 September 2026 a Google AI Overview stated that ChatGPT Ads had launched in the UAE with self-service access for local businesses. OpenAI's table did not list the UAE that day, and we wrote it up. The table caught up with the answer on 16 September. The habit from that piece still holds for the next market: read the availability page, because the country-level answer lives there.