The deal
Amazon Ads said on 10 September that advertisers can now extend campaigns from Amazon DSP into ChatGPT, announcing the integration on its own newsroom. It is a pilot, limited to select US advertisers, with Delta Vacations among the first testing it.
Ads appear as text or images beneath ChatGPT responses and are labelled as sponsored. Advertisers can buy on a cost-per-click or CPM basis, and Amazon also offers product feed ads that generate creative from an advertiser’s catalogue, Search Engine Land reported.
Who controls what
The split matters more than the mechanics. Amazon manages the buying relationship — campaign setup, optimisation, the advertiser account — as a managed service. OpenAI remains responsible for deciding how and where the ads appear inside ChatGPT, TNW reported.
That is OpenAI keeping the thing that is hard to get back — control of the surface — while renting out the thing it does not have, which is a standing relationship with tens of thousands of advertisers and the people who run their budgets.
The business behind it
OpenAI started selling ChatGPT ads in February 2026, with retailers including Best Buy and Williams-Sonoma among the early buyers, TNW notes. The advertising business reached a $1bn annualised run rate in late August, on a product that had been live for under 200 days. ChatGPT’s weekly active user figure was reported at 900 million in February.
Selling into that inventory directly means building an ad sales operation. Selling it through Amazon DSP means inheriting one.
What the advertisers said
“Conversational ads represent the fastest growing engagement opportunity for brands to reach new and existing audiences,” said Chris Conetta, director of Amazon DSP. Katrin Koenig, president of Delta Vacations, said the company was “proud to be among the first brands testing this new approach.”
What to watch
Three things. Whether the pilot opens beyond select US advertisers and on what timetable. Whether other demand-side platforms get the same access, since an exclusive arrangement and a first-mover arrangement point at very different futures for the inventory. And what the click-through economics look like: a sponsored placement under a chatbot answer is a format with no established benchmark, and the CPC number advertisers are willing to pay for it is not yet a known quantity.
