OpenAI began testing Sponsored Agents inside ChatGPT on September 16, opening a paid lane in which a user can click an ad and, per OpenAI’s own description, “a user can choose to enter a clearly labeled conversation with a business-sponsored agent.” The format is invite-gated, US-only, and framed by OpenAI (in an advertiser email reproduced by Search Engine Roundtable) as “distinct from ChatGPT’s independent answers and separate from the user’s original ChatGPT conversation.”
Angi is among the first pilot brands. In a GlobeNewswire release the same day, co-founder Angie Hicks framed the participation as an extension of the company’s “AI-first strategy,” with an Angi-branded agent surfacing in relevant home-services conversations. Unite.AI additionally names Newegg, Best Buy, Lowe’s, and VistaPrint as early ChatGPT advertisers on the broader ads surface.
The interesting move isn’t the ad unit. It’s what OpenAI shipped alongside it. HubSpot is the first CRM partner: from September 16, users can connect a ChatGPT Ads account, create campaigns, monitor performance, and follow up on leads inside HubSpot. Shopify is the first ecommerce partner, with a free ChatGPT Ads app in its App Store and an international rollout to markets where ChatGPT Ads is available set to begin September 23. New advertisers see $500 in credit against $500 in spend on OpenAI’s advertiser page, alongside a three-step campaign setup.
That’s not a pilot’s supporting cast. That’s the plumbing of a self-serve channel, staged before the channel is open.
The Register was less impressed with the agent format itself, calling it “pretty much exactly like the chatbots you see on company websites, only run by OpenAI and embedded in its products instead.” The critique has a point about the interaction, and misses one about the placement. A website chatbot waits at the end of a customer journey the brand paid to originate. A Sponsored Agent intercepts the journey mid-thought, inside the interface where the research is already happening.
Read against the ChatGPT Ads self-serve launch that opened to every market earlier this month, and against Profound’s $180M raise and the rise of AI search visibility tools, the shape becomes legible: ChatGPT is being built out with two acquisition lanes, an organic layer earned through content and entity authority, and a paid layer that’s still gated but whose distribution partners are already the default stacks of small commerce and small B2B.
The 2012 buildout of Google Shopping followed the same sequencing: merchant-feed plumbing first, paid surface second, self-serve access widening once the pipes held. Advertisers who wired up early compounded for years. The pipes here are HubSpot and Shopify. The waitlist is at ads.openai.com.
Sources
- https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/09/16/3363209/0/en/angi-among-first-brands-to-pilot-sponsored-agents-in-chatgpt.html
- https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/09/16/openais-new-sponsored-agents-are-happy-to-chat-about-selling-you-things/5296946
- https://1027wbow.com/2026/09/16/openai-tests-advertiser-sponsored-agents-expands-ai-tools-for-chatgpt-ads/
- https://www.unite.ai/openai-tests-sponsored-agents-and-rolls-out-ai-tools-for-chatgpt-ads/
- https://www.seroundtable.com/openai-chatgpt-sponsored-agents-42104.html