What happens when the landing page becomes a conversation?

For most of digital advertising’s history, the job of the ad has been relatively straightforward: attract someone’s attention and persuade them to click.

What happens after that click is usually handed over to a landing page. The visitor reads about the product, looks for answers to their questions, decides whether the business feels credible and, if everything goes well, completes a form, books a call or makes a purchase.

OpenAI has just introduced an advertising experience that could begin to change that familiar journey.

In September,OpenAI announced Sponsored Agents, which allow someone to click on an advertisement in ChatGPT and start a conversation with an AI agent representing the advertiser. Instead of immediately leaving ChatGPT and navigating a company’s website, the person can ask questions, explain what they need and explore whether the product or service is right for them.

Sponsored Agents are currently being tested with selected advertisers in the United States, so this is not yet a standard advertising format available to every business. However, the direction is significant because it suggests that the role of an advertisement may be expanding beyond generating attention and traffic.

The ad itself may soon be able to educate, qualify and respond.

From advertising message to advertising conversation

Consider a traditional advertisement for business software. The ad might promise to save time, improve productivity or reduce costs. Someone clicks through to the website and is then expected to find the information that matters to them.

Does the software integrate with their existing systems? Is it suitable for a business of their size? How long does implementation take? What support is included? How is it different from the five alternatives they are also considering?

A well-designed website should answer those questions, but it still requires the visitor to search through pages, interpret the information and decide which details apply to their particular situation.

A conversational advertisement introduces a different experience. The potential customer could ask those questions directly and receive answers based on their needs. A small business may want simplicity and pricing clarity, while an enterprise buyer may care more about security, integration and implementation. Both could begin with the same advertisement but have very different conversations.

This is more than another version of a website chatbot. Most website chatbots sit at the end of the advertising journey, after someone has already clicked, loaded the page and decided to engage. A Sponsored Agent moves that interaction closer to the point of discovery, allowing the conversation to begin within ChatGPT itself.

OpenAI says the sponsored conversation will be clearly labelled and remain separate from ChatGPT’s independent answers. After exploring the offer, the user can follow a link to the advertiser’s website when they are ready to take the next step.

That may sound like a relatively small change to the interface, but it could have a much larger impact on how businesses think about conversion.

The landing page may no longer do all the heavy lifting

Landing pages have traditionally been designed around a compromise. They need to communicate enough information to persuade a range of visitors, but not so much that the page becomes overwhelming. They need to answer objections without becoming defensive, qualify potential customers without discouraging good prospects and guide people towards a clear action.

That is difficult because every visitor arrives with different knowledge, concerns and priorities.

A conversational experience can adapt. Someone who already understands the category may want to compare features and pricing. Someone encountering the product for the first time may need a simpler explanation. Another person may be interested but unsure whether the product can solve a very specific operational problem.

Instead of forcing all three people through the same landing page, an AI agent can potentially respond to each person differently.

This does not mean landing pages are about to disappear. People will still want to visit a company’s website, review evidence, understand the brand and confirm that the business is legitimate. For complex or high-value decisions, one conversation will rarely be enough.

However, the role of the landing page may change. Rather than being responsible for the entire education and conversion process, it may become the place where someone validates what they have already learned through an AI-led conversation.

The website still matters, but the journey towards it may look very different.

AI will expose unclear positioning very quickly

There is an important limitation in all of this. An AI agent can only provide useful answers if the business has given it useful information.

If the company cannot clearly explain what it offers, who it is for, how it is different or what a customer should expect, the agent will not magically create that clarity. It may actually expose the problem more quickly.

Many businesses already have fragmented or inconsistent information across their websites, sales presentations, product documentation, FAQs and CRM. Pricing may be outdated. Different teams may describe the same service differently. Important objections may be handled by individual salespeople but never documented anywhere else.

That is manageable when an experienced salesperson is having the conversation. They can interpret what the customer means, apply their own knowledge and adjust the explanation. An automated agent needs reliable source material, clear parameters and defined rules around what it can say.

Businesses preparing for conversational advertising will therefore need more than another piece of marketing technology. They will need a structured and accurate body of information covering their products, services, ideal customers, differentiators, pricing, integrations, limitations and common sales questions.

This is also why websites may become more important rather than less important. OpenAI is introducing tools that can generate advertising campaigns from a company’s website or campaign brief. If the source material is vague, generic or incomplete, the advertising created from it is likely to carry those same weaknesses.

Automation does not remove the need for strong foundations. It makes the quality of those foundations more visible.

The conversion may happen before the customer reaches your website

Traditionally, marketers have treated the website visit as an important point in the customer journey. We measure clicks, sessions, time on the page, form completions and purchases. The behaviour taking place before the website is often much harder to see.

Sponsored conversations could move a meaningful part of the consideration process away from the website.

By the time someone visits the advertiser’s site, they may already understand the product, know whether it meets their requirements and have resolved several of their initial concerns. The website visit could happen much later in the decision process than it does today.

This creates an interesting measurement challenge. If the customer spends ten minutes asking an agent detailed questions but never clicks through to the website, was the advertisement unsuccessful? If they return three days later through an organic search and make a purchase, which interaction deserves credit?

Clicks and form completions will not be enough to assess the quality of these experiences. Marketers may need to consider the substance of the conversation, including the questions asked, the objections raised, the level of buying intent and whether the interaction produced a genuinely qualified opportunity.

The important metric may no longer be how many people clicked the advertisement. It may be how many useful sales conversations the advertisement created.

CRM integration becomes much more important

One of the most notable parts of OpenAI’s announcement is its integration with HubSpot, its first CRM partner. According to theHubSpot and OpenAI partnership announcement, businesses will be able to create and manage ChatGPT advertising, track performance and follow up with leads using HubSpot context.

OpenAI has also named Shopify as its first ecommerce partner. Eligible merchants can use theChatGPT Ads app for Shopify to create campaigns from their existing product catalogue and track results.

These integrations matter because a conversation should not become another isolated piece of customer data. If someone explains what they need, describes their business and raises several specific concerns, that context could be extremely useful to the sales or customer service team handling the next interaction.

Without a connection to the CRM, the customer may reach a salesperson and have to repeat everything from the beginning. With the right connection, the business could understand what the person is interested in, what questions they have already asked and where they are in the decision process.

This is where conversational advertising becomes much more than a new media placement. It begins to connect advertising, product information, customer data and sales follow-up in one journey.

It also reinforces the importance of first-party data. The more accurately a business can connect marketing interactions with customer quality and eventual revenue, the better equipped it will be to understand whether these new advertising experiences are genuinely creating value.

There are also questions around trust and control

Conversational advertising creates risks that do not exist in quite the same way with a fixed advertisement.

Traditional advertising copy is reviewed before it is published. A conversational agent may produce hundreds of different responses depending on what people ask. Businesses will need confidence that those answers are accurate, appropriately worded and consistent with what the company can actually deliver.

There will need to be clear boundaries around pricing, guarantees, comparisons, recommendations and claims. This will be especially important in sectors where incorrect information could create legal, financial or reputational risk.

OpenAI’s currentadvertising policies restrict a number of sensitive categories and require advertising to be clearly distinguishable from the broader ChatGPT experience. OpenAI has also stated that sponsored conversations will remain separate from ChatGPT’s independent responses.

Those protections are important because the value of an AI assistant depends heavily on trust. If users cannot easily tell when they are interacting with an advertiser, or if commercial responses begin to influence independent answers, that trust could deteriorate quickly.

Advertisers will need to earn trust too. A sponsored agent that avoids difficult questions, makes exaggerated claims or gives inconsistent answers will damage the brand just as easily as a poorly trained salesperson would.

What should businesses do now?

Most businesses do not need to rush into ChatGPT Ads immediately, particularly while Sponsored Agents remain in a limited US test. However, the announcement provides a useful indication of where digital discovery and advertising may be heading.

The practical preparation is not to build an agent simply because the technology exists. It is to make sure the business can clearly and consistently answer the questions an agent would receive.

That includes reviewing whether the company’s website accurately explains its offer, documenting common sales questions and objections, improving product and service information, clarifying what differentiates the business and connecting marketing activity with CRM and revenue data.

Businesses should also consider who will be responsible for the entire experience. Advertising teams may manage the campaign, but the agent will depend on input from sales, product, customer service, legal and operations. If those functions are disconnected, the customer experience will be disconnected too.

Advertising is moving beyond the click

The most interesting part of Sponsored Agents is not that OpenAI has created another advertising format. It is that the format challenges the role advertising has traditionally played.

An ad has usually been the invitation to begin a journey elsewhere. Conversational advertising brings more of that journey into the advertisement itself.

That could reduce friction for customers and help businesses qualify interest earlier. It could also create new measurement challenges, expose weaknesses in business positioning and place much greater importance on the quality of the information sitting behind the campaign.

Landing pages are not disappearing, and neither are websites, salespeople or traditional advertising channels. However, the assumption that every digital customer journey must begin with a click and move through a fixed sequence of pages is becoming less certain.

The next generation of advertising may not simply tell people what a business offers. It may answer their questions, understand what they need and help them decide whether to continue.

For marketers, that means the conversion journey is no longer just something we design around the advertisement. Increasingly, it may happen within it.