Code hidden within the latest ChatGPT Android app appears to reference advertisements. Spotted by Tibor Blaho, lead engineer at AIPRM and Link Research Tools, he drew widespread attention to the code with a post on X.com on Saturday, November 29, 2025.
Who knows if this will affect just ChatGPT’s free tier, like so many television streaming channels, or if it means ads for ChatGPT’s paid plans, too.
Videos by VICE
Here’s what was discovered
“Search ad,” “search ads carousel,” and “api ad target” are just a few of the lines of discovered code that heavily suggest, to say the least, that OpenAI is building the infrastructure to begin deploying advertisements within ChatGPT.
Ad carousels are ads that combine several photos or videos that scroll sideways along the screen, like staring at a carousel as it rotates in front of you. It allows you to fit more advertising content into a given space, compared to a standard one-image ad.
OpenAI has said nothing publicly about plans to introduce ads to ChatGPT, which has been ad-free ever since it launched publicly in November 2022. We don’t yet know for sure that OpenAI has decided to introduce ads, when it may introduce ads, or whether it may either back out after testing or even begin limited testing at all.
Blaho’s post took off like wildfire, so on the same day that he posted, he followed up in a reply to his original post to add additional context to his discovery. “In the latest publicly available ChatGPT Android beta app on Google Play I unpacked the APK and, when I compared it to the previous version, I saw new strings like ‘ads feature’, ‘bazaar content’, ‘search ad’ and ‘search ads carousel’ that were not there before,” he wrote.
“OpenAI has been talking for a while about maybe trying ads in a careful way, and these references are the first clear hint that this is now in active development. My guess is that ads will start around search, shopping and recommendation answers, with ‘bazaar content’ and ‘search ads carousel’ pointing to marketplace style product cards, not inside every normal chat.”
More
From VICE
-
Mega Gyarados in Pokemon UNITE -
OSLO, NORWAY – JUNE 28: Dave Mustaine from Megadeth performs on stage at the Tons of Rock festival on June 28, 2025 in Oslo, Norway. (Photo by Per Ole Hagen/Redferns) -
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM – SEPTEMBER 9: Gene Simmons, Ace Frehley and Paul Stanley of American glam metal band Kiss perform on stage at Wembley Arena on their 'Unmasked' concert tour, on September 9th 1980 in London, England. (Photo by Pete Still/Redferns) -
By: Kevin Estrada/Shutterstock
