How to Set Up ChatGPT's Ads Manager for Sponsored Agents

A sponsored agent is not a banner ad with a chatbot bolted on. It's a conversation your brand is on the hook to have well, inside someone else's app, in front of a customer who can leave the second it gets annoying. If you're the FDE who has to make that work, here's the actual setup: wiring ChatGPT Ads Manager into Shopify or HubSpot and getting a sponsored agent ready to talk, not just ready to render.

Sponsored Agents are OpenAI's new ad format: a user taps a labeled ad and drops into a conversation with your business's agent, kept visibly separate from ChatGPT's own answers, before anything links out to your site. It's currently a limited alpha with select US advertisers such as Wayfair, and OpenAI isn't taking public access requests yet. The Ads Manager work below is what you do regardless, and it's also the prerequisite: you can't stand up a sponsored agent on an account that isn't wired up.

Step 1: Confirm you actually qualify

Self-serve Ads Manager access is for eligible business advertisers in supported countries. Two things trip people up: agencies creating accounts on behalf of a client aren't supported, and being invited to a ChatGPT workspace doesn't grant ad account access on its own. Someone with admin rights has to assign an advertising role to your account specifically.

Step 2: Create and fund your Ads Manager account

Sign up at ads.openai.com and complete business verification and billing in the Ads Manager dashboard. Don't skip billing, you can't launch a campaign without it, and don't expect a polished dashboard yet: it's a beta, closer to a working tool than a finished product.

Step 3: Connect your commerce or CRM backend

This is what actually feeds your sponsored agent real product and customer data.

For Shopify: install the ChatGPT Ads app from the Shopify App Store, then confirm your catalog is syncing under Shopify Admin > Settings > Sales Channels > Agentic Storefronts. The app pulls your product catalog automatically, creates ads from that catalog data, and runs conversion tracking through a Shopify pixel. It's live for US merchants now, expanding to more markets on September 23, 2026.

For HubSpot: go to Settings > Marketing > Ads in HubSpot and connect your ChatGPT Ads account using an API key from your OpenAI Ads dashboard. This is currently a HubSpot beta, so you may need to request access first. Once connected, HubSpot can attribute contacts and deals back to the campaign that generated them, and your ChatGPT campaigns show up next to your other ad networks in the same Manage and Analyze tabs.

Step 4: Turn on the Ads Manager plugin in ChatGPT

The plugin lets you create, manage and analyze campaigns from inside ChatGPT using plain language instead of a dashboard. It has read and write access to the connected account, so treat it like any other integration with spending power: decide who on your team can connect it before you hand it a live account. A first prompt looks like this:

Turn https://www.yourbrand.com/holiday-rugs into a ChatGPT ad campaign
targeting shoppers researching living room rugs for the holidays.
Use a $75/day budget and optimize for clicks. Suggest three headline
variants and pull the hero image from the page.

The plugin proposes a campaign structure, ad copy and imagery from that page. Review before you approve anything, it's a draft, not a launch.

Step 5: Build the agent's actual product knowledge

This is the step that separates a sponsored agent from a landing page. It has to answer real questions: sizing, delivery windows, return policy, compatibility, price, without making things up. Point it at your actual support content:

Update our sponsored agent for the Fall Rug Collection so it can answer
questions about sizing, shipping times and our return policy, using
https://www.yourbrand.com/help/rugs as the source of truth. Flag any
question it can't answer confidently instead of guessing.

Treat this like building a support knowledge base, because that's what it is. An agent that guesses at a return policy is a worse outcome than no agent at all.

Step 6: Launch, then ask it how it's doing

Once the campaign is live, you can skip the dashboard for routine checks:

Show me last week's performance for the Fall Rug Collection campaign
and suggest one change to improve click-through rate.

Confirm the labeling before you call it done. OpenAI requires the sponsored agent conversation to be clearly marked as sponsored and kept distinct from both ChatGPT's own answers and the user's original conversation.

Gotchas

• Sponsored Agents themselves are alpha only, limited to select US advertisers, with no public application process yet. Everything here gets you ad-account-ready; it doesn't guarantee agent access.
• The Shopify integration is US-only until September 23, 2026.
• The HubSpot integration is in beta and may need a separate access request from HubSpot.
• The Ads Manager plugin has write access to a live spending account. Nail down who can connect it and how changes get audited before you hook it up.
• A minimum-spend requirement doesn't currently exist, but the interface is genuinely bare-bones next to Meta or Google Ads. Don't expect feature parity.

Wire the account, feed it real product data, and make sure the agent can honestly answer the question a customer is actually going to ask. That's the whole job, and it's most of the reason this launch isn't open to everyone yet.