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Sponsored Agents in ChatGPT Ads: what we know

Sponsored Agents let people chat with an AI representative of a business after clicking an ad. What OpenAI has published, what the API reveals, and what isn't known.

By 5 min read

A pale speech bubble beside a larger orange one carrying a small label tag, with dots between them

Every ad format so far has worked the same way: someone clicks, they land on your site, and your site does the rest. Sponsored Agents change that. The click leads to a conversation instead.

OpenAI has said very little publicly. But the format now has its own help page, and — more usefully — it already exists in the public Ads API. Between those two you can work out quite a lot about how it will be structured, and exactly where the open questions are.

What they are#

From OpenAI's help documentation:

Sponsored Agents are an advertising format that lets people chat with an AI representative of a business in ChatGPT. People can open a conversation from an ad to ask questions about the business's products or services.

The product announcement adds that the conversation is clearly labelled, and that people can use it to "ask follow-up questions, explore options, and learn more about the advertiser's offerings".

So: your ad appears, someone clicks, and rather than being handed off to your website they can start a labelled conversation with an agent representing your business.

Who can use them#

Not you, almost certainly. OpenAI is blunt about it:

Sponsored Agents are currently available only to selected advertisers in a limited alpha test.

And on getting in:

We're not accepting early access requests at this time. We'll announce more details about availability and how to participate when we're ready to expand access.

The product update described the test as running with select advertisers in the United States. OpenAI also notes you may see Sponsored Agents in ChatGPT even when the format isn't available for your own campaigns — so spotting one in the wild doesn't mean it has reached your account.

There is nothing to apply for. Anyone offering to get you early access is selling something OpenAI says it isn't handing out.

What the API already tells us#

This is the part that isn't in the help documentation.

Sponsored Agents are not a new ad type inside a normal campaign. They are a campaign mode — the same level as product feed campaigns. OpenAI's public API specification defines campaign mode as an enum with exactly two values:

product_feed
business_agent

Leaving the mode off gives you a standard campaign. Setting it selects one of the two specialised kinds.

Alongside it, the campaign creation body carries a business_agent_id string, and the campaign object returns the same field. So an agent is an object that exists independently and gets attached to a campaign, exactly as a product feed is created separately and then referenced by product_feed_id.

There are no public endpoints to create, list or configure a business agent. I searched the full API specification: no paths and no schemas mention one. The Ads Manager plugin documentation is explicit in its limitations that "business-agent ad creation is not supported".

Taken together, that says the agent itself is provisioned outside the public API — by OpenAI, for alpha participants — and that the advertiser-facing surface when it opens up will most likely be: build the agent somewhere, then point a campaign at it by ID.

What that implies about structure#

If business_agent behaves like product_feed, a few things follow from how the existing mode works:

  • Campaign-level settings — budget, schedule, locations, platforms, audience inclusion and exclusion — should work as they do today.
  • The mode is fixed at creation. For product feed campaigns, "you cannot change the mode after creation", so expect an agent campaign to be a separate campaign rather than a toggle on an existing one.
  • One agent per campaign, since business_agent_id is a single string rather than a list.

I want to be clear that this is inference from the shape of the API, not documentation. Treat it as a reasonable expectation, not a plan.

What happens to your data#

The privacy model for advertiser conversations is already documented in OpenAI's user-facing FAQ, and it is narrow:

If you choose to message an advertiser through an ad (for example, to ask questions while making a purchase decision), the advertiser will only see the messages you send them directly.

Everything else stays on OpenAI's side. Advertisers don't get the person's chats, chat history, memories, name, email, precise location or IP address. Ads reporting is aggregated.

For a Sponsored Agent that means the conversation someone has with your agent is the conversation you get — not the chat that led them there.

The open questions#

These are the things nobody outside the alpha can answer yet, and they are the ones that decide whether the format is worth planning for:

  • How is the agent built and what does it know? Nothing published says whether it draws on your product feed, a knowledge base you supply, your website, or something configured by OpenAI.
  • What do you pay for? Current billing is per click or per thousand impressions. A conversation is neither. Whether a Sponsored Agent is billed on the initial click, per conversation, or some other way is undocumented.
  • How do conversions work? The entire measurement stack assumes a click that lands on your site carrying a click reference. If the click opens a conversation instead, it is not obvious where the oppref goes, or how a purchase that happens later gets attributed. This is the biggest unknown for anyone selling things.
  • Will it leave the US? The test is US-only. Availability for advertising generally now covers 63 countries, but that tells you nothing about this format.

What to do about it now#

Honestly: very little, and that's the useful conclusion.

You cannot request access, you cannot build an agent, and the measurement story is unresolved. Anything you do specifically to prepare for Sponsored Agents is speculative work on a format you can't test.

What does transfer is unglamorous and useful either way. An agent representing your business will be answering the questions your customers actually ask — sizing, materials, delivery times, returns, compatibility. Those answers being accurate and findable already helps your product pages, your feed, and the context hints that decide where your ads appear today. If you want to do something in anticipation, make your product information good. That work is never wasted.

And watch the campaign mode. The day business_agent stops being alpha-only, it will show up in the same campaign type dropdown that currently offers Standard and Product feed — which is the first place this site will look.

I build LLM Pixels, a Shopify app for ChatGPT Ads conversion tracking.