OpenAI appears to be testing a new advertising format in ChatGPT where clicking an ad could open a business-specific AI agent instead of a traditional website.
The AI agent could answer customer questions, recommend products, provide business information & collect leads directly inside a ChatGPT conversation.
The new format appears to be available today through ChatGPT Ads Manager for a limited group of advertisers. However, the experience has not yet been widely seen by users, so it remains unclear how these ads will appear inside ChatGPT or how prominently they will be shown.
How the New Ad Format Could Work
The system appears to have three main parts:
1. Business profiling
ChatGPT can crawl a company’s website & automatically create a business profile. This profile can include common customer questions, support information & other general details about the business.
2. Business agent creation
Advertisers can then create & configure a business-specific AI agent using custom instructions.
The agent can combine the automatically generated business profile with additional sources, including product feeds, Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools for live business data & custom lead-generation forms.
The underlying technology appears to use the same foundation that powers Custom GPTs.
3. Agent-powered campaigns
Instead of sending users to a website URL after they click an ad, advertisers can create campaigns that send users directly into a conversation with the business agent.
Why This Matters
For decades, online advertising has followed a familiar path: an ad gets a click & the click takes the user to a webpage.
This approach could change that model.
With chatbot-native advertising, the conversation becomes the destination instead of the website.
The business agent can promptly provide a reply, suggest a product, set a time, help with a problem, or get a list of potential clients before the customer ever checks out the company's website.
What We Know So Far
The infrastructure suggests that OpenAI is actively exploring chatbot-native advertising, where an ad click launches an AI representative for the business rather than a traditional landing page.
The capabilities appear to be available to a limited group of advertisers through ChatGPT Ads Manager. But because the end-user experience has not been widely observed, it is still unclear how OpenAI plans to display these ads & how prominently they will appear within ChatGPT. To stay updated, get in touch with Vybepop Media.
