OpenAI has quietly enabled an “Audiences” feature inside ChatGPT Ads that lets advertisers upload email addresses and phone numbers, raw or hashed, to build targeting lists for their campaigns. The rollout carries no help documentation yet, and the company has not issued a formal announcement.
Advertiser Craig Graham first spotted the feature and shared a screenshot on LinkedIn, according to Search Engine Roundtable. The onboarding screen reads: “Create your first audience: Upload raw or hashed emails and phone numbers to use as audience filters for campaigns.” A second advertiser, Joss Froggatt, confirmed seeing the same option and shared the detail screen, per Search Engine Roundtable’s report.
The mechanic mirrors Google Customer Match and Meta Custom Audiences, tools that let brands match their own customer databases against a platform’s logged in user base rather than relying solely on the platform’s behavioral signals. For ChatGPT Ads, that pairing is notable: the platform already has something Google Search and Meta feeds do not, a running record of what a user is actually asking for in a conversation. Layering first party customer data on top of conversational intent gives advertisers two independent signals to target against instead of one.
OpenAI previewed this direction in its June Ad Tools Terms, which described Audience Tools for first party data upload. This appears to be the first live sighting of that language turning into a shipped interface, ahead of any public documentation explaining match rates, retention periods, or hashing requirements.
The unanswered question is consent. Google and Meta both require advertisers to certify that uploaded contact lists were collected with permission, and both platforms publish hashing specifications and data retention limits. OpenAI has not yet published equivalent guardrails for Audiences, and Search Engine Roundtable’s report notes no help document currently exists. Any brand uploading a customer email list to a conversational AI platform is handing over data to a system that also logs and can reference user conversations, a combination that raises the compliance bar above a standard search or social ad account.
The timing also says something about how fast OpenAI is filling out its advertising stack. Reports of ChatGPT’s ad generation tool, which drafts creative from a product description, surfaced only a day before this Audiences sighting. Shipping creative generation and audience targeting within 24 hours of each other suggests OpenAI is building a full funnel ad platform rather than a single bolt on feature.
Advertisers running early ChatGPT Ads tests should confirm hashing method and data retention terms with OpenAI directly before uploading any customer list, since no public documentation yet defines either.
Search Engine Roundtable reported the ChatGPT Ads Audiences sighting, based on Craig Graham’s and Joss Froggatt’s LinkedIn posts, on July 7, 2026.
