The next advert will not open a website. It will open a conversation.

For twenty years the logic of digital advertising stayed the same: show an advert, generate a click, send the person to a page, and hope they find what they came for.

This week, the two largest platforms in the world announced, one day apart, versions of the same idea: what if the advert opened a conversation instead of a page?

It is worth understanding what was actually announced, what of it reaches Portugal, and what a Portuguese company can do right now.

What OpenAI announced

On September 16, OpenAI began testing Sponsored Agents: business-sponsored AI agents that a user can talk to after interacting with an advert inside ChatGPT.

OpenAI's own example is someone who sees a dining table in an advert and wants to know whether it fits their room, how many people it seats, or how to care for the finish. The conversation is clearly labelled as sponsored, stays separate from ChatGPT's independent answers and from the user's original conversation, and ends with a link to the company's website.

The same announcement carried two partnerships that say a lot about the direction: HubSpot as first CRM partner, and Shopify as first ecommerce partner.

What Google announced the next day

On September 17, at its Rethink ROI event, Google announced its own set of agentic commerce updates.

The most visible is the Business Agent inside YouTube adverts, letting someone watching a video ask detailed product questions and get answers without leaving YouTube.

But two others matter more to anyone selling online. The first is conversational attributes in Merchant Center: instead of static tags, a retailer can now supply answers to common product questions, compatible accessories and possible substitutes. The second is the AI Performance Insights dashboard, showing retailers their share of mentions against competitors across experiences such as AI Mode and AI Overviews.

And there is one concrete figure worth more than all the rhetoric: Google reports an average 5% conversion lift the following month for merchants who adopt core product feed best practices.

What reaches Portugal, and when

Here it pays to be blunt, because most articles on this subject are not.

Almost none of this is available in Portugal right now. Sponsored Agents are a test limited to selected advertisers in the United States. Business Agent in YouTube is a beta for eligible US retailers. The AI Performance Insights dashboard is available in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and the United States, and Portugal is not on the list.

There is one exception, and it has a date. The ChatGPT Ads app for Shopify launched on September 16 in the United States and expands from September 23 to the other markets where ChatGPT Ads already operates, which have included Europe since the end of August. For a Portuguese Shopify store, that is next week.

As for the rest, the historical pattern for these platforms is familiar: test in the United States, expand afterwards. Anyone who starts preparing the groundwork now arrives ready.

What genuinely changes for sellers

The fundamental shift is not the advert format. It is the kind of information that becomes necessary.

In a traditional advert, the goal is the click. Quality is measured in a good image, a good line and a good button.

In an advert that talks back, the question becomes different: what happens after someone shows interest? If the agent can answer on dimensions, materials, delivery times, compatibility and conditions, the conversation moves forward. If it cannot, it dies there.

And the agent only knows what the company made legible. A product page saying "Chair model X, 149 euros" cannot answer "I need an ergonomic chair for eight hours a day, I am 1.90 m tall and want to spend under 200 euros".

That is why Google's conversational attributes arrived alongside everything else. The platforms are asking companies for better data because data is what feeds the answers.

The website did not die. It became the source machines read.

Every time a new platform appears, the same prediction returns: websites are about to disappear. It happened with social media, with apps, with Google Maps.

Reality usually runs the other way. The more platforms exist, the more necessary a central source of correct information about the company becomes.

An agent needs to know prices, dimensions, areas served, delivery conditions, differences between options, and the questions customers ask before buying. If that is scattered across PDFs, Instagram posts, WhatsApp messages and outdated pages, no system can work with it.

The website stops being only what the customer sees. It becomes what systems consult to understand the business.

What a company would do today

We do not recommend abandoning campaigns that work in order to chase the newest platform. We recommend preparing the groundwork, which pays off even if none of this reaches Portugal quickly.

  1. Structure products and services with enough detail to answer real questions, not merely to fill a page.
  2. Answer, on the site, the doubts that exist before a purchase, in clear and direct language.
  3. Work SEO and GEO together, because organic presence in AI answers and paid presence will coexist, exactly as they do on Google today.
  4. Make sure measurement exists. If visits or enquiries start arriving from AI platforms, you need to be able to identify them.
  5. Test with a small budget. A two-hundred-euro experiment teaches more than six months arguing about whether a platform will catch on.

We wrote here recently about the other half of this story, appearing in the answers when someone asks an AI who does this locally. That was organic presence. This is the paid layer being born on top of it.

Will it replace Google Ads?

No, and it is one of the least useful questions available.

Instagram did not kill Google. TikTok did not kill Instagram. What is happening is fragmentation of discovery: someone finds a restaurant on TikTok, checks reviews on Google, asks an AI which is best for dinner with children, and books somewhere else entirely.

The question is no longer which platform you have to be on. It is whether your company is present at the moments customers decide.

How Digito helps

This article points to three concrete pieces of work, and all three are what we do.

We prepare your business information to be legible to AI systems: product pages and service pages with the detail needed to answer real questions, rather than promotional copy that answers nothing. We work SEO and GEO together, so the company appears in organic answers while the paid layer matures. And we set up measurement so that when this traffic starts arriving, you can identify it instead of watching it vanish into "direct".

If you already invest in paid media or are considering AI automation, this is the moment to prepare the groundwork, not to rebuild the strategy.

And if we conclude that in your case the best move is to carry on with exactly what already works, we will say that too.

Let's talk about your case.

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