Sean Walsh
Sean is a Director at Intelligency heading up our digital marketing and client services operations. Sean has 15+ years experiencing working both in-house and agency with brands including Lloyds, Alstom, Hitachi, Lufthansa, Viaplay, DFDS Seaways and Mercedes-Benz.
OpenAI announced on 16 September that it is testing a new advertising format inside ChatGPT called Sponsored Agents. The announcement is significant not because ads in ChatGPT are new – they have been running since early 2026 and reached a $1 billion annualised revenue run rate in under 200 days – but because Sponsored Agents represent a genuinely different relationship between an ad and the person who sees it. This is not a banner or a sponsored listing. It is a conversation.
The format is live in the United States with a small number of advertisers. OpenAI is accepting interest from businesses that want to join future testing. International expansion is planned for markets where ChatGPT Ads already run, which includes Europe. Understanding what this format does and how it works is worth doing now, before it becomes mainstream.
What a Sponsored Agent actually is
When someone sees a relevant ad in ChatGPT, they can choose to start a conversation with a business-sponsored AI agent. That conversation is clearly labelled as a Sponsored Agent interaction. It is separate from ChatGPT’s independent answers and from whatever the user was originally talking about.
In that conversation, the user can ask follow-up questions about a product or service, describe what matters to them, get personalised answers based on their specific situation, and then click through to the advertiser’s website when they are ready. OpenAI’s framing is that the Sponsored Agent lets users go deeper – beyond the initial ad impression and into a genuine exploration of whether the product or service is the right fit.
A simple example: someone using ChatGPT to research dental treatment options in London sees an ad for a specialist clinic. Rather than clicking straight through to the website – where they may not find answers to their specific questions – they start a conversation with the clinic’s Sponsored Agent. They describe their situation, ask about treatment timelines, costs and what the process involves. The agent answers based on the clinic’s actual information. When the user is ready to book a consultation, they follow the link. The clinic’s website receives a warmer, better-informed visitor than standard paid search delivers.
Why this is different from what came before
The standard paid search model, which has underpinned Google Ads and most digital advertising for over two decades, is built on interruption and redirection. You see the ad, you click, you land on a page, the page tries to convert you. The quality of the landing page determines whether that conversion happens. Search behaviour has been shifting for several years toward more conversational, research-led queries rather than transactional ones. Sponsored Agents are designed for exactly that shift.
The distinction OpenAI is drawing is between the ad and the agent’s answers. The Sponsored Agent gives the advertiser’s perspective. ChatGPT’s independent answers remain uninfluenced by advertising. Those two things are kept separate and the user can see which is which. Whether that separation holds as the format scales, and whether users trust it, will determine how much of a shift this represents in practice.
The commercial rationale is clear. ChatGPT Ads reached $100 million in annualised revenue by March 2026. By late August it had passed $1 billion. That growth rate reflects advertiser demand for access to ChatGPT’s user base, which has passed 800 million weekly active users. OpenAI is now building the advertising infrastructure to match that scale.
The campaign management changes alongside it
Sponsored Agents are not the only thing OpenAI announced on 16 September. The company is also bringing AI into the campaign creation process itself. Advertisers can now use natural-language prompts in ChatGPT Work to create, update and analyse campaigns through an Ads Manager plugin. The idea is that a business could brief a campaign in plain English and the system would build it, with the advertiser reviewing and editing the output before anything goes live.
Ads Manager is also getting AI-generated copy and image suggestions based on an advertiser’s landing page and campaign objective. New integrations with HubSpot and Shopify are being added, giving advertisers attribution data that connects ChatGPT conversations to downstream CRM and purchase activity. Flexible attribution windows of 7, 14 or 30 days are now configurable, as is a view window for impression-based conversion reporting.
Taken together these changes move OpenAI’s advertising product from a simple placement model toward something closer to a full campaign management system, with AI running more of the creation and optimisation work. The parallels with how Google Ads has evolved over the past five years – toward automated bidding, AI-generated creative, Performance Max – are not subtle.
What this means practically for businesses and agencies
For any business currently running or considering paid search, Sponsored Agents raise four questions worth thinking about now rather than when the format goes mainstream:
- What would your Sponsored Agent actually say? The quality of a Sponsored Agent conversation depends on the quality of the information you give it. Businesses with clear, detailed, accurate content about their products and services are better positioned than those with thin or generic descriptions. This is the same principle that governs AI search visibility generally – the businesses that have invested in specific, authoritative content will have more to work with.
- How does this interact with your existing paid search budget? ChatGPT Ads are not replacing Google Ads. They are an additional channel with a different user intent profile. Someone using ChatGPT to research a purchase decision is often earlier in the funnel and more information-seeking than someone typing a query into Google. The pricing, targeting and optimisation logic for Sponsored Agents will differ from what most teams are used to.
- What does attribution look like? The HubSpot and Shopify integrations suggest OpenAI is aware that proving the commercial value of a conversational ad format requires connecting the conversation to downstream outcomes. Until that attribution is robust, measuring the ROI of Sponsored Agents will be as imprecise as measuring the ROI of content marketing was a decade ago.
- Is the format right for your sector? Conversational advertising makes most sense for considered purchases where the buyer has questions before they commit. High-value services, healthcare, financial products, education and complex B2B decisions are obvious candidates. Impulse purchases and commodity products are less obvious fits. The format rewards businesses that have something interesting to say when someone asks them a question.
The broader direction this confirms
Sponsored Agents are one more confirmation of a direction that has been building across every major AI platform in 2026: the interface between a user and a business is becoming conversational rather than transactional, and the businesses that are good at conversation – that have clear answers to the questions people actually ask – are the ones that will benefit most from that shift. Whether your next customer finds you through a Google result, a ChatGPT recommendation, or a Sponsored Agent conversation, the underlying question is the same: when they ask about what you do, is your answer good enough to earn the next step?
