What are context hints? ChatGPT Ads targeting, explained
Context hints are what ChatGPT Ads targets instead of keywords. What they are, how they differ, and how to write ones that deliver.
If you’ve opened the ChatGPT Ads API documentation, you’ve met a field called context_hints and probably assumed it was keywords wearing a new name. That assumption costs money, so let’s kill it early.
The one-sentence version
A keyword targets what someone types into a search box. A context hint targets what someone tells ChatGPT about their situation.
Those are different sentences produced by different people in different moods. “plumber stockholm” is a query. “There’s water coming through my kitchen ceiling and I don’t know if I should turn off the electricity” is a conversation. ChatGPT Ads places your ad in the second one — a sponsored card under the answer, shown to free-tier users whose conversation matched your hints.
Why keyword habits fail here
Fifteen years of Google discipline taught advertisers to compress: strip the situation away, bid on the residue, and let match types catch the variants. “Emergency plumber.” “Plumber near me.” Short, generic, high volume.
Hints reward the opposite instinct. The matching engine has an entire conversation to work with, so the strongest hints keep the situation in:
- “burst pipe, need someone tonight”
- “water leak under the kitchen sink”
- “what does an emergency plumber call-out cost”
Scenario plus intent, in the words a person would actually use mid-problem. If your hint reads like something a stressed human would say to an assistant at 11pm, it’s probably good. If it reads like a bid report row, it probably isn’t.
Fewer than you think
The API accepts up to 2,000 hints per ad group. Early accounts that treated that ceiling as a target watched delivery stall. What the early data supports instead is five to eight specific hints per ad group, with each ad group built around one intent.
That last part matters as much as the count. A person describing an emergency and a person comparing three quotes are in different conversations and need different ads. Mixing their hints into one group means one card has to speak to both — so it speaks to neither. Split by intent: acute need, comparison shopping, brand. Write each group its own card.
Exclusion is targeting too
The less obvious half of hint writing is deciding which conversations you’d rather stay out of. A renovation firm that doesn’t do new builds, a B2B service that consumers keep clicking on — every business has traffic it pays for and regrets. Naming those situations explicitly (as exclusion hints, or simply by keeping them out of your hint phrasing) is often worth more than another positive hint.
Try it on a real page
We built a free hint generator that reads any landing page and returns grouped hints with a one-line explanation of who each group reaches — plus the JSON to paste straight into the API. No account needed. The fastest way to develop a feel for hints is to see a good set written for a page you know well.