Amazon is opening ChatGPT to its advertisers, and that tells you something about where shoppers are going

Key points

• Amazon announced on Thursday, 10 September 2026, that it is partnering with OpenAI to let select U.S. Brands place ads inside ChatGPT.
• OpenAI's advertising business has already reached $1 billion in annualised revenue, meaning the pace of income if current earnings held for a full year.
• ChatGPT reached 900 million weekly active users in February 2026, according to OpenAI.
• Amazon was the top retail company buying ads on ChatGPT between April and August 2026, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.
• Ad units appear as text or images beneath ChatGPT's answers, with Amazon setting up campaigns and OpenAI controlling which ads actually run.

For years, Amazon kept a tight grip on its online store, quietly blocking AI chatbots including ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude from accessing its product listings while pouring money into its own in-house AI shopping tools. The message was clear: don't help the competition.

That stance is shifting.

On Thursday, Amazon announced a partnership with OpenAI that lets brands already advertising on Amazon extend those campaigns into ChatGPT. It's the clearest signal yet that conversational AI, the back-and-forth question-and-answer format ChatGPT popularised, has become a real place where shoppers make decisions. We covered Amazon's push into proactive AI commerce just nine days ago, when Alexa gained a feature designed to prompt purchases before users think to ask.

How do the ads actually work?

The setup splits responsibility cleanly. Amazon's demand-side platform, a system that lets large advertisers buy ad space across many sites at once, creates and manages each campaign. OpenAI's own ad system then decides which ads to show based on what the user is asking. The ads appear as short text messages or images just below ChatGPT's response.

Ask ChatGPT for running shoe recommendations and a sponsored result from a brand already selling on Amazon could surface underneath the answer.

OpenAI started selling those sponsored placements in February 2026, beginning with retailers like Best Buy and Williams-Sonoma. Its ad business is already running at $1 billion a year in revenue. Amazon, it turns out, was a significant early customer even before this formal deal. Sensor Tower data, first reported by CNBC Tech, showed Amazon ranked as the top retail advertiser on the platform from April through August 2026, buying space quietly while publicly keeping its store closed to the same platform.

What does this mean for ordinary shoppers?

If you use ChatGPT to research a purchase, expect to see more branded results beneath the answers. Those results will be placed as ads rather than part of ChatGPT's own recommendations, though how visually distinct they are from organic answers will matter a great deal in practice.

For small businesses that already advertise on Amazon, the partnership potentially widens their reach without a separate ChatGPT ad account. The infrastructure runs on what they already use.

Amazon called conversational ad formats the "fastest growing engagement opportunity" for brands in its blog post. That framing is telling: the retailer now treats a competitor's chatbot as a distribution channel rather than a threat.

The honest read here is that Amazon watched its own shoppers migrate toward AI-assisted browsing and concluded that blocking those platforms was costing more than it was protecting. Revenue won the argument. Watch whether this deal quietly cracks open Amazon's product listings to ChatGPT's shopping features next, because that would be the bigger story.