OpenAI has just announced Sponsored Agents for ChatGPT Ads, and I think this is considerably more important than another new advertising format.
The idea is fairly simple. Someone sees an ad in ChatGPT and rather than immediately clicking through to the advertiser’s website, they can start a conversation with an AI agent representing that business.
They might ask whether a dining table will fit their room. Whether a jacket is warm enough for skiing. Whether a service is suitable for their particular circumstances. Only when they’re ready, do they need to visit the advertiser’s website.
OpenAI is currently testing Sponsored Agents with selected US advertisers, so we’re at the beginning of this rather than looking at a finished product. But it points towards a much bigger change in how people could interact with businesses online.
Not all agents are the same
At almost the same time, we’ve been looking at Microsoft’s Clarity Brand Agents.
These sit on the business’s own website and act more like an AI salesperson or personal shopper. Microsoft’s current beta supports Shopify and WooCommerce sites and can use the retailer’s catalogue to help customers find products and answer questions.
We’ve already encountered a reason businesses need to pay attention.
We found the feature live on client websites when the clients hadn’t intentionally configured an agent themselves. Whatever the route by which a new feature becomes active, that’s a useful warning: don’t assume you know what is running on your website simply because you didn’t personally put it there.
Go and look.
But there’s a more fundamental difference between these two approaches.
With an on-site agent, the customer has already arrived on your website. You still own that environment.
With OpenAI’s Sponsored Agent, part of the conversation takes place inside ChatGPT.
And that has consequences.
What happens to the bit of the customer journey you can't see?
Suppose somebody clicks your ChatGPT ad and starts talking to your Sponsored Agent. They ask six questions and eventually decide your product isn’t right for them. They never visit your website.
From one perspective, that’s brilliant. Nobody wants to pay to bring poorly qualified traffic onto a website. But from a measurement perspective, something interesting has happened. Part of your customer’s consideration process has taken place somewhere else.
OpenAI says advertisers don’t get access to individual ChatGPT conversations, although it is developing measurement tools including conversion and pixel-based measurement for its advertising platform.
That could create some peculiar-looking marketing numbers.
Your website traffic might fall while the people who do arrive are better qualified. Your website conversion rate could therefore rise. Look only at your website analytics and you could conclude that the site has suddenly become much better at converting people.
It hasn’t necessarily. An AI agent may simply have removed more of the people who weren’t going to buy before they ever reached it.
For an industry obsessed with attribution, that’s going to require some adjustment.
The really big change comes when agents can act
Answering questions is useful. Doing things is where agents become genuinely disruptive. Imagine telling an AI:
“Find me a black dress for a wedding next Saturday, under £150, available in my size, that can arrive by Thursday.”
The agent could potentially search, compare, check availability and eventually buy. At that point, the website stops necessarily being the customer’s main interface with the retailer. We’re already seeing the infrastructure for this being built.
Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is designed to allow AI systems, retailers and payment providers to communicate with each other. Google has demonstrated purchases taking place from its AI experiences while the retailer remains the merchant of record.
There was plenty of noise around the Australian launch this summer, with Kogan, THE ICONIC, Bunnings, Adore Beauty and Petbarn among the retailers announced.
The public evidence since then suggests we’re still very much in the experimental stage.
THE ICONIC, for example, describes its integration as limited. At launch it involved a small selection of its own-label products, Australian customers, Google Pay and single-item purchases. Its website and app remain its primary shopping destinations.
That’s worth remembering whenever we’re told the future has arrived. Usually, it arrives in pieces.
Your website may not disappear. Its job may change.
For years digital marketing has largely assumed a journey that looks something like this:
Search → click → website → conversion.
Agents potentially break that model apart.
Discovery could happen in ChatGPT. Questions could be answered by an agent. Products could be compared without visiting individual retailers. Eventually, transactions and bookings could happen through agents too.
That doesn’t make websites irrelevant. But it could make something else much more important: the information underneath them.
If an AI agent is going to recommend your product, it needs to understand it. If it’s going to quote a price, it needs accurate pricing. If it’s going to check availability, make a booking or complete a purchase, it needs reliable access to those systems.
Suddenly feeds, structured product information, availability, pricing and clean business data aren’t just technical housekeeping. They’re how your business communicates with your customer’s AI.
For a closer look at what this means in practice, read our guide to optimising your product feeds for better results in AI search.
We’re not at the point where everyone will hand their shopping over to an agent. The early UCP implementations alone show how much work remains.
But the direction is becoming clearer.
We’re already seeing some interesting early signals in the traffic. Volumes from ChatGPT Ads are still far too small to draw firm conclusions, but across the traffic we’re monitoring, organic clicks from ChatGPT are currently converting better than paid clicks.
That isn’t necessarily surprising. Someone who has had an organic conversation with ChatGPT, asked questions and then chosen to visit a business may already be considerably further through their decision-making process than someone responding to an ad.
It’s far too early to call that a trend, but it’s another reason marketers will need to think differently about what a “click” from an AI platform actually represents.
The next battle in digital marketing may not simply be getting people onto your website.
It may be making sure the agents acting between you and your customers can understand your business in the first place.
