Amazon is opening a door it had previously kept almost completely shut: a selection of US brands buying advertising through its platform will be able to extend their campaigns to ChatGPT as well. The initiative is still experimental, but carries weight beyond its initial scope. The world's largest online retailer is effectively recognizing OpenAI's chatbot as a marketing space worth occupying, despite having long restricted artificial intelligence platforms from accessing its catalog and shopping services.
The campaigns will be organized and managed by Amazon, while OpenAI's advertising system will handle the actual delivery of the ads. The placements may appear as text or images below the responses provided by ChatGPT and will be labeled as sponsored content. In other words, Amazon provides the commercial relationship with advertisers, while OpenAI retains control over the in-product advertising experience.
The test is launching with several brands in the United States. Among the participants cited by Amazon is Delta Vacations, the vacation package service tied to Delta Air Lines. One highlighted use case involves a user asking for advice on training for a marathon: following the chatbot's response, they might see an ad for running shoes sold on Amazon. It is a format that seeks to integrate into a context very different from traditional search: not browsing a results page, but taking part in an ongoing conversation around a concrete need.
A move running counter to Amazon's cautious stance
The news should be seen in light of Amazon's posture to date. The company has strictly limited access to its vast store for external services like ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Gemini, while developing proprietary AI-driven tools to assist shoppers. Catalog data, pricing, availability, and signals derived from customer searches are sensitive assets: granting third-party interfaces too prominent a role in product discovery would mean risking a loss of control over the customer relationship.
The deal does not equate to opening the Amazon store to external chatbots. Instead, it concerns the sale of promotional space on ChatGPT to brands already integrated into Amazon's advertising ecosystem. The distinction is substantial. Amazon is not handing over the universal showcase role for its catalog to OpenAI, nor is it relinquishing its own retail infrastructure; rather, it is offering advertising clients an additional channel on which to extend existing campaigns.
Nonetheless, the move signals a shift in tone. In recent months, Amazon had already begun buying ads on ChatGPT. According to Sensor Tower, between April and August it was the retail company that spent the most on ads on the platform. Moving from directly promoting its own presence to allowing advertisers to do the same is a significant step: ChatGPT is being treated as a channel worth engaging with, rather than merely an external interface to be contained.
For OpenAI, a partner capable of scaling its ad model
For OpenAI, the value of the agreement lies primarily in the quality of the partner. Amazon Ads boasts an extensive network of companies, campaign planning and management tools, as well as an established position in e-commerce-related marketing. Bringing a portion of this advertising demand into ChatGPT can accelerate the service's commercial experimentation without forcing OpenAI to build every brand relationship from scratch.
OpenAI began selling sponsored placements on ChatGPT in the United States in February, with retailers such as Best Buy and Williams-Sonoma among the first advertisers. Its advertising business recently hit an annualized revenue run rate of $1 billion. This figure reflects the speed at which the new revenue stream is forming, but it does not yet clarify how stable it will be over time or what share it will represent relative to the company's other revenue.
The user base, however, makes the project relevant to the industry: in February, OpenAI reported that ChatGPT had reached 900 million weekly active users. An audience of this scale turns any decision on ad placement into a pivotal issue for advertisers, competing platforms, and users. Amazon itself describes conversational formats within chatbots as one of the fastest-growing engagement opportunities to reach both new and existing customers.
Advertising enters the response flow, with limits yet to be verified
The chosen format attempts to keep content and promotion separate. OpenAI explained that ads are served at the end of a response and clearly labeled as sponsored. This placement aims to prevent advertising from visibly altering the text generated by the model, but it does not eliminate the questions that will surround the test: how relevant the ads will be to the dialogue, what data will be used for selection, how frequently they will appear, and whether users will be able to unambiguously distinguish the chatbot's advice from an advertiser's message.
The available information does not detail targeting criteria, the duration of the pilot, the number of companies involved, or any potential expansion to other countries. It is therefore impossible to determine whether Amazon will make access a standard option for its entire advertising client base or if it will remain an integration limited to selected partners. Financial aspects also remain open: no rate cards, revenue-sharing mechanisms, or metrics for evaluating results have been disclosed.
For brands, the appeal is obvious: intercepting users as they formulate a need, a comparison, or a request for help. But the transition from information retrieval to contextual advertising is delicate. In a chatbot, context does not stem solely from a keyword: it can encompass multiple messages, stated preferences, and a goal that evolves throughout the exchange. The relevance promised by the format will therefore have to coexist with a high level of transparency and commercial pressure that does not compromise the perceived usefulness of the service.
Amazon and OpenAI present themselves here as partners with complementary interests. The former expands the distribution of the campaigns it sells to its clients; the latter gains an important link to the e-commerce advertising market just as its ads model seeks to consolidate. The test does not immediately change the closed nature of the Amazon store toward external AIs, but it makes more porous a boundary that until now seemed clear-cut: conversations in ChatGPT also become a place where companies in the Amazon universe can look for customers.
