Sponsored Agents: OpenAI Lets Advertisers Chat Back Inside ChatGPT

When OpenAI lit up its first sponsored messages in ChatGPT in February, the format looked deliberately conservative: labeled placements, separate from the answers, nothing that talked back. On September 16, 2026, the company crossed the line it had been drawing all year. A new test feature called Sponsored Agents lets a user who clicks an ad start a conversation with an agent sponsored by the business behind it — a chat window inside ChatGPT where the advertiser, effectively, gets to answer.

The announcement, published under the title “Reimagining advertising with AI,” bundles four moves: the Sponsored Agents test with select US advertisers, natural-language campaign tools inside ChatGPT’s Ads Manager plugin, first-of-their-kind integrations with HubSpot and Shopify, and a $500 ad-credit offer for new advertisers. Together they mark the most aggressive expansion of OpenAI’s advertising business since the format launched — and the clearest signal yet of where the company thinks the money in AI-native advertising actually lives.

How Sponsored Agents work

The mechanics matter, because OpenAI is working hard to keep them distinct from the answers users trust. When a relevant ad appears in ChatGPT, the user can choose to enter a “clearly labeled conversation” with a business-sponsored agent. In that conversation they can spell out what matters to them, ask follow-up questions, and click through to the business’s website when they’re ready to move forward.

OpenAI’s own example is a shopper who sees an ad for a dining table and wants to know whether it fits their space, how many people it seats, or how to care for its finish. Instead of leaving ChatGPT to dig through a product page, the Sponsored Agent answers in place — pitching dimensions, seating capacity, and finish-care instructions on the advertiser’s behalf.

The company is explicit about the separation: the conversation with a Sponsored Agent is “distinct from ChatGPT’s independent answers and separate from the original conversation that the user started in ChatGPT.” That framing is doing a lot of work. It is the structural firewall between an ad unit that talks and a model whose recommendations users might otherwise assume are neutral. Whether users perceive the distinction as clearly as OpenAI describes it is the bet’s central question.

Sponsored Agents are being tested with select advertisers in the United States, with no announced timeline for wider rollout.

Ads Manager gets a mouth

The second prong is aimed at the other side of the marketplace. Advertisers can now create, update, and analyze campaigns with plain-language prompts inside ChatGPT, through the Ads Manager plugin. A website or a brief can serve as the starting point for a campaign; the plugin reports on performance and recommends next steps — an AI-native simplification of the dashboard-and-csv workflow that dominates conventional ad platforms.

Inside Ads Manager itself, OpenAI is adding generative assistance: when drafting an ad, advertisers get suggested copy and imagery drawn from their landing page and campaign objective, which they can review and edit before anything goes live. “Advertisers remain in control,” the company said — a phrase that acknowledges the obvious anxiety about fully automated ad creation.

A third capability, opt-in AI text customization, is the most interesting of the three. When enabled, it adapts an advertiser’s existing headlines and descriptions to the context of a conversation, and automatically translates ad copy into the user’s preferred language. That is dynamic creative optimization taken to its logical endpoint: ad text that reshapes itself around the individual conversation it appears in. It is also precisely the kind of contextual mutation that advertising regulators — especially in the EU, where ChatGPT Ads landed in 31 markets in August — will want to inspect.

HubSpot, Shopify, and $500 of free money

The distribution partnerships are the least glamorous part of the announcement and possibly the most consequential. HubSpot becomes OpenAI’s first CRM partner for ChatGPT Ads: from September 16, businesses can connect a ChatGPT Ads account and — without leaving HubSpot — create ads, monitor performance, and follow up on leads, with the work powered by their existing HubSpot context. Shopify becomes the first ecommerce partner: US merchants get a ChatGPT Ads app in the Shopify App Store (listed as free, developed by OpenAI), with products already connected through Shopify Catalog so campaigns can start immediately. The app supports audience segments, custom audiences, device, location, platform, and product-category targeting, with analytics covering spend, click-through rates, conversions, and cost per acquisition. International availability in markets where ChatGPT Ads runs begins September 23.

The point of both integrations is spelled out in OpenAI’s own words: “Adopting a new advertising channel shouldn’t require businesses to rebuild the way you work.” Lowering onboarding friction to near-zero is how every successful ad platform scaled — Google with AdWords inside search workflows, Meta with pixels and catalogs — and Shopify’s merchant base is the closest thing to a ready-made long tail of ecommerce advertisers anywhere.

The advertiser signup page sweetens it: $500 in ad credit for every $500 of spend by new advertisers. It also names Newegg, Best Buy, Lowe’s, and VistaPrint as early advertisers, with Newegg’s performance marketing manager Alec Shao making the case in one line: being present in ChatGPT while people research purchases “helps build consideration.”

From experiment to $1 billion run rate

The pace of this business is the story behind the story. A brief timeline: in April, OpenAI was hiring ad-tech firms to make ChatGPT ads talk back to users, and moved the format to cost-per-click pricing the same month. On August 20, the ads expanded to 31 European countries. By August 31, ChatGPT Ads had reached a $1 billion annualized run rate. On September 11, Amazon began letting its advertisers buy ChatGPT placements in a pilot. And now, sixteen days into September, the format has acquired conversational agents, generative creative tools, and two of the largest SMB distribution channels on the internet.

For context on why the acceleration matters: the ads business is OpenAI’s hedge against a subscription ceiling. Industry analyses earlier this year projected ChatGPT Plus subscribers could drop by as much as 80% in 2026 — from 44 million to 9 million — as free-tier capabilities improved, putting billions of subscription revenue at risk. An ads business already at a $1 billion run rate after two quarters, growing through international expansion and now through agent-driven conversion, is the replacement revenue stream arriving ahead of schedule.

The trust question, again

Every expansion of ChatGPT Ads re-litigates the same tension. OpenAI’s position has been consistent since February: ads are clearly labeled, separate from answers, and never influence what the model says. Anthropic has built rival positioning around staying ad-free entirely. Sponsored Agents test that firewall at a new depth — not “can an ad sit next to an answer” but “can an advertiser’s voice hold a conversation inside the product without contaminating the rest of it.”

OpenAI says the conversations are opt-in, clearly labeled, and separate from the user’s original chat. The company also emphasizes that people control how their data is used for ads. Those are the right commitments, and the labeling will need to be unmissable for the format to wear well: a sponsored conversation about whether a dining table seats eight is commerce; a user who can’t tell whether ChatGPT’s own answer about dining tables was shaped by the advertiser is the moment the product’s core promise breaks.

The test is running with select US advertisers now. How it scales, and whether the “measured approach” OpenAI promises survives contact with a $500-credit land grab for SMB budgets, will say a lot about what the default shopping experience inside ChatGPT looks like by this time next year.