Amazon just opened the door to ChatGPT
20 September 2026
Emily Milner – Advertising Manager
Amazon has announced that brands advertising through Amazon DSP will soon be able to extend their campaigns into ChatGPT, with the first advertisers already being trialled in the US. I think this signals something much bigger about where Amazon sees shopping behaviour heading.
Amazon has historically been fairly protective of its retail ecosystem when it comes to external AI platforms, while investing in its own AI shopping tools. Which is what makes this one worth paying attention to. By allowing brands that advertise on Amazon to reach consumers inside ChatGPT, Amazon is acknowledging that the platform has become an important part of the discovery journey. OpenAI said earlier this year that ChatGPT has reached 900 million weekly active users, and its advertising business has reached a $1bn annualised revenue run rate.
Amazon has been testing the waters itself, becoming the largest retail advertiser on ChatGPT between April and August. Now it is opening that opportunity up to its own advertising customers. Campaigns will be managed through Amazon, with OpenAI’s advertising system deciding where and when ads are served. The ads will appear underneath ChatGPT responses and will be clearly labelled as sponsored.
But the interesting part isn’t the ad format, it’s where in the customer journey the ad appears.
On Amazon, a shopper might search “women’s running shoes”, filter by price and browse through the results. In ChatGPT, the same shopper might ask: “I need running shoes for a half marathon, under £150, for long distance training”. The platform will need to interpret what the shopper is trying to achieve rather than simply matching a keyword.
For advertisers, that creates a different type of intent to work with. We’ve spent years optimising around search terms, product detail pages and purchase behaviour. Conversational AI adds another layer, because the consumer is explicitly telling the platform what they need, their budget and potentially their preferences. The value is that the platform can reach someone at the point where the platform already knows their occasion, their budget and their constraints.
It also puts even more emphasis on the fundamentals. Good product data, clear positioning, strong content, competitive pricing, availability and reviews are becoming increasingly important when AI is influencing which products consumers discover. If a shopper asks an AI platform to find the right products for them, brands need to make sure their product can be understood well enough to be considered in the first place.
Amazon putting ChatGPT inventory in front of its advertisers feels like an early sign of a much broader shift. As consumers start moving from searching for products to simply describing what they need, product discovery could become less about winning a search result and more about becoming the answer.
Want to understand how your brand could appear in AI-led shopping journeys through Amazon DSP and ChatGPT? Get in touch with the Luzern team to explore what this could mean for your products.