Is this new ChatGPT ad format available to all advertisers right now?

No. Based on the reporting, it's currently only visible inside OpenAI's advertiser tools to a limited group of testers, and no one has confirmed how it will look or behave once it's shown to regular ChatGPT users.

How would this ad format be different from a normal ChatGPT ad that links to a website?

Instead of the click sending someone to a landing page, it would open a conversation with an AI agent trained on that specific business, using a profile OpenAI generates from the company's site plus additional data the advertiser adds, like product listings and lead forms.

What should marketers do to prepare for chatbot-native ads?

Since the format isn't public yet, there's no campaign setup required today. But making sure your website content clearly answers common customer questions and that product data is well-structured will help if and when this rolls out more broadly.

OpenAI Is Testing Ads That Open a Chatbot Instead of a Landing Page

Why this matters for marketers

If you've spent the last two years optimizing landing pages for conversion, get ready to add a new destination to that list: a conversation. OpenAI appears to be piloting an ad format where the click doesn't send someone to your site at all. It opens a chat with an AI agent built specifically for your business, one that can answer questions, walk through your product catalog, or capture a lead on the spot.

That's a meaningfully different job than the one your landing pages currently do. Instead of copy and layout doing the persuading, a conversational agent trained on your business becomes the first (and possibly only) touchpoint a prospective customer has with your brand before they decide to buy, book, or move on. For agencies and in-house marketers already thinking about generative engine optimization, this is another signal that the unit of optimization is shifting from pages to structured, machine-readable business knowledge.

What's actually happening

The find comes from entrepreneur Juozas Kaziukėnas, who shared screenshots on LinkedIn showing new functionality inside ChatGPT's advertiser tools, as reported by Search Engine Land. According to that reporting, the setup involves three pieces working together.

First, ChatGPT scans a company's website and puts together an automatic profile of the business, pulling out things like frequently asked customer questions and basic support details. From there, advertisers can shape a dedicated business agent by layering in custom instructions on top of that generated profile. Businesses can also connect additional inputs, such as a product catalog feed, live data pulled in through Model Context Protocol connections, and forms designed to collect lead information directly inside the chat.

Once that agent exists, campaigns can be built to send users straight into a conversation with it rather than out to an external URL. Search Engine Land notes the underlying tech looks to be built on the same infrastructure behind Custom GPTs, OpenAI's existing tool for building purpose-built chat assistants.

Why this breaks from the usual ad model

Online advertising has run on the same basic loop for decades: someone sees an ad, clicks it, and lands on a page you control. This format skips that last step. The conversation itself becomes the endpoint, potentially letting a business handle FAQs, suggest products, set up appointments, or qualify a lead before the user ever opens a traditional web page.

What's still unclear

According to the report, this exists today inside OpenAI's advertiser tooling but only for a small set of testers, and nobody outside that group has yet seen what the ad actually looks like from a user's side. So it's not yet clear how these ads will be labeled, how often they'll show up, or how prominent they'll be within a normal ChatGPT session. Still, the fact that this infrastructure exists at all is a strong hint that OpenAI is seriously exploring a version of advertising where the click hands you off to an AI representative instead of a webpage.

What to do about it now

Nothing here is live to the general public yet, so there's no campaign to launch this week. But it's worth starting to think about your business the way an AI crawler might: does your site clearly answer the questions customers actually ask? Is your product data structured in a way a bot could parse cleanly? Businesses that already treat their web presence as a knowledge source rather than just a sales brochure will have a head start whenever this format widens out.