Amazon starts selling ads inside ChatGPT in a US pilot

Amazon is now a way to buy advertising inside ChatGPT.

The pilot

Amazon Ads announced a US pilot that lets select advertisers run ads in ChatGPT. Delta Vacations is among the first to test it. Advertisers buy the placements through Amazon’s advertising tools, while OpenAI’s own ad system decides where the ads appear.

According to Search Engine Land, Amazon runs the campaigns as a managed service through its demand-side platform, and advertisers can buy the inventory on a cost-per-click or a cost-per-thousand-impressions basis. Amazon sets up and optimizes the campaigns; OpenAI’s system handles delivery.

OpenAI said in August 2026 that its ad business had reached a 1 billion dollar annual run rate.

Why it matters for OpenAI

Selling through Amazon gives OpenAI access to advertisers who already run large campaigns on Amazon’s platform and would not set up a separate relationship with a new ad seller. It is a distribution deal for ad demand, the same way retail media networks expanded by selling inventory on other companies’ sites.

Why it matters for users

For ChatGPT users, the practical change is that the brands they see in conversations may increasingly be bought through the same channel that sells product ads on Amazon. OpenAI keeps control of placement, which leaves the question of how commercial content is separated from answers in OpenAI’s hands. The pilot is limited to select US advertisers for now, so its scale and format will be clearer once it expands.