Amazon Ads and OpenAI announced on September 10 that select U.S. advertisers can now extend campaigns into ChatGPT through Amazon’s demand-side platform, with Delta Vacations among the first brands in the pilot. Marketing Dive describes the arrangement as a managed service: Amazon sets up the campaigns, OpenAI’s ad system controls delivery, and the inventory sits inside the same DSP that already runs Netflix and Prime Video buys.
The pilot’s most interesting fact is one that predates it. Between April and August, Sensor Tower data reported by CNBC shows Amazon quietly became the top retail company advertising on ChatGPT, months before the two companies acknowledged a formal relationship. What launched yesterday isn’t the start of Amazon’s presence on the surface. It’s the moment Amazon opens that surface to everyone else it already sells media to.
The context underneath explains the urgency. OpenAI began selling ChatGPT ads in February with Best Buy and Williams-Sonoma; by late last month the business had crossed a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate against ChatGPT’s 900 million weekly active users. Ads surface as text or image placements beneath responses with sponsored labels, priced on CPC or CPM, with product-feed ads that auto-generate creative from catalogues. Pilot advertisers see five metrics: impressions, clicks, cost per result, CPM, and CPC.
That’s a functional ad product. It’s not yet a mature one. Nate Elliott, an analyst at eMarketer, told Digiday that OpenAI is “still trying to build out even many of the basics of a functional ad sales operation, including their team, technology, vendor partnerships, ad formats, and pricing.” Marketing Dive reports some early advertisers have been underwhelmed by performance. Amazon’s DSP, which historically undercuts rivals on fees, is being wheeled in to fix exactly those gaps.
Chris Conetta, director of omnichannel supply at Amazon DSP, framed it in the corporate register: “Conversational ads represent the fastest growing engagement opportunity for brands to reach new and existing audiences.” Translated, Amazon is treating ChatGPT the way it treated connected TV three years ago, as inventory to consolidate before rivals can.
For small-team operators, the practical shift is that appearing in ChatGPT is now partly a media-buying question, not only an organic-content one. Two audits are worth doing this quarter: whether your business shows up in ChatGPT answers today (see AI tools as the third-biggest local-discovery channel), and whether paid placement is reachable given that ChatGPT Ads recently hit self-serve availability across markets.
One caveat keeps the channel from being pure funnel. eMarketer finds only 1 in 10 AI-assisted shoppers currently transact on a native AI interface; 69% still complete the purchase on a retailer site. Chat is where the decision forms, not where the card is charged. That may not last: Meta’s Muse agent, which browses and transacts inside chat, points toward the closing of that loop. The pilot announced yesterday is Amazon making sure the media layer arrives first.
Sources
- https://advertising.amazon.com/library/news/amazon-ads-chat-gpt-advertising-integration
- https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/10/amazon-chatgptads-open-ai.html
- https://digiday.com/media-buying/amazon-brings-its-dsp-to-openais-chatgpt-ads-extending-its-supply-chasing-streak/
- https://www.marketingdive.com/news/amazon-pilots-ad-services-in-chatgpt-what-marketers-need-to-know/829945/
- https://www.emarketer.com/content/amazon-gives-advertisers-access-chatgpt-ads-with-openai-partnership