Amazon Ads Officially Integrates With ChatGPT, Initial Rollout Open to Select U.S. Brands

[Ebrun Exclusive] September 11 — Amazon announced an advertising partnership with OpenAI yesterday, marking a formal integration between the e-commerce giant’s ad business and the generative AI chatbot. Select Amazon DSP advertisers in the U.S. market will now be able to extend their ad campaigns to ChatGPT, with Delta Vacations among the first brands to participate in the pilot.

According to currently disclosed details, advertisers can pay on a cost-per-click or cost-per-impression basis, and may submit their product catalogs for the system to automatically generate ad creatives. The ads will appear in text or image format below ChatGPT’s responses, with clear labeling indicating sponsored content. Amazon’s team is responsible for building and optimizing the ad campaigns, while OpenAI’s ad system retains authority over which ads are displayed and in which conversation contexts they appear. For now, the program operates as a fully managed service, available only to a select group of U.S. brands; Amazon has not yet launched a self-service ad portal for the integration, and standard Amazon sellers’ Sponsored Products listings will not be automatically distributed to ChatGPT.

The partnership comes less than a year after Amazon blocked OpenAI’s web crawlers from accessing its site.

Throughout 2025, OpenAI rolled out a series of upgrades to enhance ChatGPT’s shopping capabilities. In April, ChatGPT Search began displaying product images, review summaries and merchant links; in September, the company partnered with Etsy and Shopify to launch instant checkout functionality; and in November, it rolled out Shopping Research, a feature that enables product comparison based on real-time pricing, inventory levels and user reviews.

In contrast, Amazon has steadily tightened restrictions on external AI tools’ access to Amazon.com. In August 2025, the company expanded its blocked list in robots.txt, barring multiple AI crawlers operated by Anthropic, Perplexity, Google and other firms from accessing its website. By November, Amazon added OpenAI’s ChatGPT-User and OAI-SearchBot crawlers to the restricted list, having already blocked GPTBot, the crawler used for large language model training. The block means ChatGPT cannot directly pull real-time pricing, inventory or review data from Amazon product pages. As per Amazon.com’s current publicly available robots.txt, GPTBot, ChatGPT-User and OAI-SearchBot remain blocked from accessing the site. Amazon did not publicly state a reason for the blocks at the time, though CEO Andy Jassy noted during an earnings call that some third-party AI shopping agents provide inaccurate information on pricing, inventory and delivery. Jassy added that Amazon is open to exploring collaborations, but requires clear alignment on user experience and value exchange terms. Amazon has also been building out its own AI shopping entry points, including its in-site shopping assistant Rufus, and Buy for Me, a feature that can place orders on users’ behalf across other brand websites.

Entering 2026, ChatGPT’s commercial value has become increasingly tangible. OpenAI began testing ads in the U.S. in February, and by the end of August, the ad business had reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate. Sensor Tower data shows that Amazon has been purchasing ad placements directly on ChatGPT since April this year, ranking as the largest retail advertiser on the platform between April and August. The new partnership effectively productizes Amazon’s earlier direct brand advertising efforts on the platform.

Amazon DSP commands significant ad budgets from a wide range of retail, travel, financial and consumer brands, and the ChatGPT integration will allow Amazon to further expand its off-site ad inventory. For OpenAI, the partnership provides access to a pipeline of mature, established advertisers and their product catalogs.

For now, product pages, pricing data, review content and transaction checkpoints remain fully under Amazon’s control. ChatGPT is being added as purchasable ad inventory within Amazon DSP: while the ad delivery pipeline is now live, Amazon’s core e-commerce data and checkout system have not been opened up to the integration.

For Amazon sellers, there is no new direct ad placement access available at this stage. The key points to watch going forward are whether the pilot will expand to more Amazon DSP clients, and whether Amazon will be able to leverage its on-site purchase data for ad attribution and performance measurement for ChatGPT campaigns. These two capabilities will determine whether ChatGPT ads ultimately function as a brand awareness channel, or a new channel capable of directly driving product conversions.

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