OpenAI ad experiment could change what happens after the click
ChatGPT ads appear to launch business-specific AI agent that answers questions, recommends products, and captures leads.
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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. So, 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.
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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.
These capabilities appear to be available today in the 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 that OpenAI is actively exploring chatbot-native advertising, in which a click launches an AI business representative rather than a webpage.
This new ad type option was spotted by Entrepreneur Juozas Kaziukėnas, who shared it on LinkedIn.
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Constantine von Hoffman is senior editor of MarTech. A veteran journalist, Con has covered business, finance, marketing and tech for CBSNews.com, Brandweek, CMO, and Inc. He has been city editor of the Boston Herald, news producer at NPR, and has written for Harvard Business Review, Boston Magazine, Sierra, and many other publications. He has also been a professional stand-up comedian, given talks at anime and gaming conventions on everything from My Neighbor Totoro to the history of dice and boardgames, and is author of the magical realist novel John Henry the Revelator. He lives in Boston with his wife, Jennifer, and either too many or too few dogs.
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