On September 10, Amazon Ads announced a partnership with OpenAI: US advertisers can now buy ad inventory inside ChatGPT through Amazon's own demand-side platform (DSP). Ads show up as text and image blocks beneath ChatGPT's responses, labeled "sponsored," and for product feeds the creative is generated automatically from the seller's catalog. Travel operator Delta Vacations is already testing the program as part of a pilot group of advertisers. Pricing runs on CPC or CPM, and the rollout is, for now, limited to the US market.
Who actually controls what gets shown
The mechanics of this partnership are more interesting than a standard ad-network integration. Amazon handles buying and campaign management — the familiar interface, the familiar metrics, the product catalogs. But the final call on where, and at what point in a conversation, an ad appears belongs to OpenAI. It's a division of labor: one partner brings the advertisers and the money, the other controls the user experience and decides whether a given ad would spoil a given chatbot answer. For businesses, that means buying ads inside ChatGPT will run through the familiar Amazon Ads interface, but the rules of the game inside the chatbot itself are still set by OpenAI — which can change them without looping Amazon in.
A concrete example: picture the owner of a small hotel in Madeira who already runs campaigns through Amazon DSP to promote listings on booking platforms. Once the program exits its pilot phase, that same ad account would let them show their offer to someone who's chatting with ChatGPT, planning a trip to Portugal, and asking for hotel recommendations — without having to learn a separate OpenAI ad console, which, for that matter, doesn't yet exist as a standalone product for small businesses.
It's also worth flagging the technical side: for product ads, the creative is assembled automatically from a catalog already uploaded to Amazon — so sellers don't need to prepare separate banners for the ChatGPT format; the system itself picks the image and product description to fit the conversation's context. That lowers the barrier to entry for anyone already advertising on Amazon, but it also means less control over exactly how the brand shows up in any given chatbot answer — the automation, not the advertiser, decides which product card gets shown each time.
Why it's too early to celebrate a cheap new channel
There are at least three reasons not to rush in. First, scope and volume aren't disclosed — only a "select group" of US advertisers is participating, and there's no word on how quickly the program will open up to Europe or to mid-sized businesses rather than just large brands like Delta Vacations. Second, chatbot users behave fundamentally differently than search users: someone asking an AI for advice expects a neutral answer, not an ad insertion, and how audiences will react to an explicit "sponsored" label inside a conversation is an open question with no click-through or conversion data yet. Third, the very fact that placement depends on OpenAI's decisions means an advertiser is putting budget into a channel whose formats and frequency a third party can change at any time, with no obligation to coordinate with Amazon.
Still, the direction is telling: the largest ad platforms are, one after another, embedding themselves in conversational interfaces, and whoever figures out the mechanics ahead of competitors will gain an edge not right now, but in setup experience once the channel opens up properly. Google took a similar path with its AI Max update for paid search, and so did Meta with its AI creative-generation tools — in 2026, ad budgets are steadily shifting toward wherever people already spend time with AI, not just classic search results or the social feed.
For businesses, that means it's worth planning for 2027 with conversational channels in mind already — not necessarily committing budget right now, but at least figuring out where in your sales funnel ads inside chatbots would fit once the program leaves its pilot stage and becomes available outside the US.
At Dayava, we track integrations like this one and help businesses plug into new advertising and communication channels without the setup headache. If you'd like to be among the first to test these formats for your business, leave a request at dayava.pt/contactos/.
Source: Search Engine Land, "Amazon pilots ChatGPT ads through its DSP"