What happened

On 16 September 2026, OpenAI launched Sponsored Agents.

Here’s how it works. When a user’s question in ChatGPT touches a relevant category, a clearly labelled sponsored agent can surface in the conversation. Tapping it opens a separate chat with that brand’s own AI — one trained to field product questions, narrow the options down, and move the user toward a purchase.

Early advertisers include Wayfair (running at limited scale) and Angi (which launched a homeowner-facing agent), with Newegg, Best Buy, Lowe’s and VistaPrint also on the initial list.

The scale is worth noting: OpenAI’s advertising business reached a $1 billion annualised run rate in under 200 days, and the company is targeting $2.5 billion in ad revenue for 2026.

Why it matters to you

Search-era advertising sells placement: your ad sits above the results, alongside the organic ones, and the user decides which to click.

Sponsored Agents sell a conversation. They move a brand from “a name inside the answer” to “something you can talk to” — and what gets said in that conversation is decided by an AI the brand trained itself.

That cuts two ways, and they point in opposite directions.

One is a new door. If your category is on the list and the budget is there, this is a route that doesn’t require waiting for the AI to think of you on its own.

The other is more awkward. It splits “being mentioned by AI” into paid and unpaid versions. Until now an AI answer contained one kind of list — the one it picked. Now there’s a second kind that was bought. For brands not buying, being crowded out by an ad is the smaller problem. The bigger one is that users start losing track of which mention was judgement and which was purchased, which thins out the trust that made an AI recommendation worth having.

And one thing needs to be clear: you can buy a sponsored agent; you cannot buy a citation. Advertising is its own block. It won’t make ChatGPT mention you more often when answering ordinary questions. Those are two separate lines in the back end, and money only buys one of them.

What to do about it

Nothing much, if you’re a Taiwanese brand. Every launch advertiser is a large US retailer or home-services marketplace, and there’s no public information on timing or market expansion. Nobody can hand you a schedule for when this reaches Taiwan, and anyone promising you one is selling something.

What’s worth holding on to is this: the ad-slotting of AI answers has started. Search walked the same road — a clean results page at first, then three or four paid slots on top, organic pushed down. If AI answers head the same way, the room for being mentioned without paying only gets smaller than it is today.

So the conclusion is the same one as two years ago, just more urgent: build the route that doesn’t cost money before the slots get sold. Getting cited depends on content that can be lifted, facts that are concrete, and a consistent description of you off-site. None of those stop working because ads appeared — but they take time to accumulate, and ads don’t.

If you want to know where you currently stand on the route that doesn’t cost money, we can take a look first.

Further reading