OpenAI appears to be building chatbot-native ads that launch AI agents

OpenAI appears to be experimenting with a new ChatGPT advertising format that replaces the traditional destination website with a conversational AI agent tailored to each business.

Instead of sending users to a landing page, clicking an ad would open a business-specific ChatGPT conversation equipped to answer questions, surface products, and capture leads.

What’s happening. OpenAI is laying the groundwork for what could be a fundamentally different type of online advertising.

The workflow appears to have three key components:

• Business profiling. ChatGPT first crawls a company’s website to automatically generate a business profile. That profile includes common customer questions, support information, and general context about the business.
• Business agent creation. Advertisers can then configure a business agent using custom instructions. The agent combines the generated business profile with additional data sources, including product feeds, Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools for live business data, and custom lead-generation forms.
• Agent-powered campaigns. Rather than directing traffic to a website URL, advertisers launch campaigns that point users directly into conversations with the business agent.

The underlying technology appears to be the same foundation that powers Custom GPTs.

Why we care. For decades, digital advertising has followed the same basic pattern: an ad generates a click, and the click opens a webpage. This model flips that paradigm. The conversation, not the website, becomes the destination.

That could allow businesses to answer customer questions immediately, recommend products, schedule appointments, troubleshoot issues, or qualify sales leads before a user ever visits a traditional website.

What we’re watching. These capabilities appear to exist today within ChatGPT Ads Manager for a limited group of advertisers. The end-user experience has not yet been widely observed, so it’s unclear exactly how these ads will appear inside ChatGPT or how prominently they’ll be surfaced.

Still, the underlying infrastructure suggests OpenAI is actively exploring chatbot-native advertising, where the click launches an AI business representative instead of a webpage.

First spotted. This new ad type option was spotted by Entrepreneur Juozas Kaziukėnas, who who shared it on LinkedIn.