Why agentic commerce will matter more than ChatGPT ads

Not a week goes by without me reading about ChatGPT ads in my LinkedIn feed. I’m guilty of it, too. 

There’s so much happening so quickly. The product feed integrations, the Ads Manager beta, and the inevitable comparisons to Google’s dominance in search advertising. 

While it’s a compelling narrative for agencies looking to drive new business, it’s also short-sighted. The real shift isn’t advertising on LLMs like ChatGPT. It’s happening in checkout flows, voice assistants, and agentic commerce infrastructure, where the transaction itself becomes the ad unit. 

The brands quietly winning this next cycle are refining their product data to ensure they factor into AI-powered purchase decisions.

ChatGPT Ads is structurally weak

Referral traffic from ChatGPT to the rest of the web grew 206% in 2025, according to Semrush’s analysis of 17 months of U.S. clickstream data. That’s the headline most people stopped at.

What they didn’t read was the footnote: that growth is driven by deeper engagement from existing users, not by audience expansion. ChatGPT’s U.S. user base has been essentially flat since September 2025. The people who use it are using it more. But the addressable audience isn’t growing.

This obviously matters if you’re trying to build an advertising business. Ad revenue scales with reach, and reach requires a growing audience. Without new users coming in, you’re running the standard sequence (build an audience and then monetize at scale) backward. 

OpenAI’s leaked financials show another structural challenge: $13 billion in revenue against $34 billion in total costs and expenses in 2025, translating to an operating loss of nearly $21 billion. 

On the bright side, OpenAI spent $2.37 to generate every $1 in revenue in 2024. By 2025, that ratio had improved to $1.60 per dollar. Progress, but not nearly enough, or fast enough. It’s no surprise OpenAI postponed its IPO until next year.

To put those numbers in perspective, Amazon lost $30 million the year it went public. Google and Meta were already profitable before their IPOs. OpenAI isn’t playing in the same league. 

The scale of the bet is unlike anything the tech industry has attempted before. How long before investors pull back? Your guess is as good as mine.

OpenAI’s master plan is agentic

Here’s what the ChatGPT Ads narrative misses: Ads are a defensive move, not a strategic vision. Sam Altman has always been against them. 

But OpenAI had to realize that to fund its dollar-hungry master plan, it needed something to help balance the books, at least partially.

So what’s that master plan? Look elsewhere for a clearer view.

At Google I/O 2026, Google introduced Universal Cart, building on Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), infrastructure that lets AI agents complete purchases on your behalf. This isn’t a shopping tab redesign. It’s a transaction layer between intent and purchase, with Gemini deciding what gets recommended and bought. If you’re skeptical, remember you can already onboard UCP. This is happening today, not in some distant future.

It’s the same story at Amazon. The company combined Rufus, its expert shopping assistant used by more than 300 million customers in 2025, and Alexa+, its personalized AI assistant available across hundreds of millions of devices, into a unified experience called Alexa for Shopping. 

The result is a surface that enables customers to automate deal-finding and routine purchases based on personalized insights. Like Gemini, Alexa can complete the transaction, dramatically shortening the distance from ad impression to purchase.

It’s the same story at OpenAI. The company already has integrated product feeds in Ads Manager. You’d think it’s a basic feature because Google, Meta, and Amazon all have it. But that soon in a brand-new advertising platform? 

OpenAI launching product feed ads in 2026 isn’t an advertising innovation. It’s a platform reaching for familiar revenue streams while the more interesting architecture takes shape beneath the surface.

Dig deeper: Why product feeds need an organic strategy for AI search

What this means if you’re buying paid media today

Most of the industry is asking the wrong question. The question isn’t, “Should I test ChatGPT Ads?” (Obviously, you should.) Or even, “Should I diversify beyond Google?” (Again, obviously you should.)

The right question is: “Is my product data ready for agentic commerce?”

Because when an AI agent — whether it’s Alexa, Google’s shopping agent, or whatever OpenAI builds next — makes a purchase recommendation on behalf of a user, it won’t pull from your campaign creatives. It’ll pull from your product feed. The cleanliness and completeness of that data will determine whether you exist in the recommendation.

This is the same transition we’ve lived through before, just at a different layer of the stack.

When Google moved from keywords to audiences to intent signals, the advertisers who won were the ones with cleaner conversion tracking and stronger first-party data foundations. When Meta moved to Advantage+ and black-box optimization, the winners built better creative systems.

It’s the same pattern here: Data is king. Agentic commerce applies the same dynamic to the transaction layer.

I know. The checklist isn’t glamorous. 

• Make sure your product feeds are complete, accurate, and updated in near real time. 
• Ensure your structured data — product attributes, availability, profitability, and more — is properly implemented across your catalog. 
• Invest in API integrations with the platforms building agentic infrastructure. 

Bottom line: Treat your product data the way you should’ve been treating your conversion tracking for the last decade. It’s a competitive advantage, not a maintenance task.

Dig deeper: Winning the AI decision layer: From AI discovery to agentic commerce

The real battle isn’t in the ad console

ChatGPT Ads will generate some revenue. It’ll attract some advertisers, produce some case studies, and exist as a line item in some media plans. That’s fine.

But it won’t be the next Google Ads. It won’t scale into a duopoly-level advertising machine. The audience ceiling is real, the cost structure is brutal, and the competitive moat — the thing that made Google’s search ads irreplaceable for 20 years — simply isn’t there.

The tidal wave isn’t in the ad console. It’s in the infrastructure being built around task completion, automated purchasing, and agent-to-agent commerce. Google and Amazon are already constructing it. The brands that show up there won’t do it through better bidding strategies. They’ll do it through better data. Start there.