Amazon Ads today confirmed a partnership with OpenAI to carry advertising inside ChatGPT, opening a route for advertisers to extend their existing Amazon campaigns into a conversational chat environment. The arrangement, announced on September 10, 2026, places a select group of United States advertisers into a pilot the company calls ChatGPT Ads, positioning the retail media giant inside a surface that has moved from experiment to billion-dollar business over the preceding seven months.

In Short

Amazon and OpenAI made a deal so that companies advertising with Amazon can also show ads to people chatting with ChatGPT. Right now only a handful of advertisers in the United States are trying it out, and Delta Vacations is one of the first. The idea is that instead of only seeing an ad while scrolling, you might see one while asking ChatGPT for help deciding what to buy or where to travel.

What Amazon announced

According to Amazon, the partnership lets advertisers already running Amazon campaigns add what the company describes as a conversational ad experience on ChatGPT. The pilot is limited in two ways that the announcement makes explicit: it covers select advertisers, and it runs only in the United States. Amazon framed the integration as a way for marketers who plan, build, and optimize campaigns across the full funnel to reach people who are actively using ChatGPT.

The stated mechanic is that Amazon Ads will let advertisers engage with customers at the point where those customers explore options, compare choices, and make decisions inside the chat interface. That description situates the surface at the consideration and decision stages rather than at pure awareness, a distinction that matters for how buyers will judge its value.

Chris Conetta, Director of Omnichannel Supply at Amazon DSP, tied the move to a shift in where audiences spend time. "Conversational ads represent the fastest growing engagement opportunity for brands to reach new and existing audiences," Conetta said. "The AI-driven ad experience is not just a vision of what's to come, but an opportunity for advertisers to meet relevant users where they spend time today. With access to ChatGPT Ads, advertisers can now extend their campaigns further into where their customers are actively spending time in conversational chat platforms."

The company also restated its own data position in the announcement, describing programmatic technology that draws on trillions of proprietary browsing, shopping, and streaming signals paired with supply-side relationships, and delivering outcomes across customer touchpoints without relying on ad identifiers.

Delta Vacations among the first testers

The announcement named one participating brand. Delta Vacations, the travel arm tied to the airline, is testing the format, and its president spoke to the rationale in travel terms.

"Travel planning is becoming increasingly personalized, and travelers expect experiences that feel relevant," said Katrin Koenig, President of Delta Vacations. "Through our collaboration with Amazon Ads and ChatGPT Ads, we can leverage deep consumer insights to inform how and when Delta Vacations appear within ChatGPT Ads experiences to create new opportunities for travelers to engage and discover vacation possibilities. We're proud to be among the first brands testing this new approach and helping define what the future of AI-powered marketing can look like."

Travel is not an incidental category here. Sensor Tower's early measurement of ChatGPT advertising, reported by PPC Land, placed travel among the fastest-growing verticals on the platform through the summer of 2026, alongside financial services, software, and health and wellness. A travel brand testing the surface first fits the pattern that independent data has already surfaced.

The surface Amazon is entering

To read the significance of Amazon plugging in, the state of ChatGPT advertising itself matters, and that story is well documented. OpenAI confirmed plans to test advertising within ChatGPT on January 16, 2026, ending months of speculation and multiple internal delays across 2025. The advertising test then launched on February 9, 2026 for logged-in adult users in the United States on the Free and Go subscription tiers, with paid tiers and users under 18 excluded.

The economics of entry have compressed sharply since. At launch the minimum commitment stood at $200,000 to $250,000, with a CPM of $60. By mid-April the CPM had fallen to as low as $25 and the minimum entry threshold had dropped to $50,000, arriving alongside the quiet launch of a self-serve ads manager. OpenAI's ads manager going live cut the barrier further as the pilot crossed $100 million in annualized revenue. By early May, CPC bidding had been added and the minimum had reached zero for some buyers.

The revenue trajectory tells its own story. ChatGPT advertising passed $100 million in annualized revenue within roughly six weeks of the pilot's launch, expanding to more than 600 advertisers. By the end of August the business had crossed a $1 billion annualized run rate, according to Sensor Tower, whose September 1, 2026 report also found that the number of ads shown per user per hour on the mobile app in the United States rose 163% in August compared with April. Ad density climbed at an average rate of 26% month-over-month across that four-month window.

That is the surface Amazon has joined: one that has scaled its revenue tenfold and multiplied its ad load in under two hundred days.

Why a retailer joins a chatbot

Amazon does not need OpenAI to reach shoppers. Its own advertising segment passed $70 billion on a trailing twelve-month basis earlier in 2026, and it holds direct purchase signal data that few rivals can match. The value the partnership adds is not audience volume but placement in a discovery moment that increasingly happens inside a chat window rather than a search bar.

Amazon has itself signaled how far that shift has traveled. At an industry panel covered by PPC Land in July, Amazon asserted that its own conversational agent had overtaken its search bar in the United States, a claim that, if accurate, describes a change in the primary discovery mechanism on the largest retail media network in the world. Extending Amazon campaign signals into ChatGPT is consistent with a company treating conversational surfaces as the next place where purchasing intent forms.

The move also sits inside a longer sequence of Amazon efforts to connect its infrastructure to conversational AI. The company quietly built an agentic commerce team aimed at ChatGPT, opened its advertising APIs to AI agents through the Model Context Protocol in a closed beta, and has pushed conversational ad formats across its own properties. Amazon opened its Conversational Entertainment Ads on Alexa+ to self-service buyers on June 17, 2026, a format built to target the moment a customer asks what to watch next. The ChatGPT integration extends the same logic to a surface Amazon does not own.

The attribution question the announcement leaves open

The unresolved issue running through conversational advertising is measurement, and the Amazon announcement does not address it. ChatGPT historically lacked a pixel or a standard attribution system, a gap that narrowed over the course of the pilot as OpenAI introduced a Conversions API and pixel-based measurement tools. Even so, the measurement infrastructure that would give performance advertisers confidence in the channel is, as PPC Land has documented, still being built.

Amazon's own strength here is instructive. The company has spent 2026 tightening the loop between an off-Amazon ad exposure and an on-Amazon purchase, from naming the specific retailers its DSP ads drive sales to through Omnichannel Metrics, to extending its Amazon Marketing Cloud lookback window from 13 months to 25 months. How that closed-loop capability translates onto a conversational surface owned by another company, where a user asks a question rather than clicks a product feed, is precisely the problem the pilot will have to demonstrate in practice. The announcement offers no detail on how attribution will function across the ChatGPT surface.

Context for the marketing community

For media buyers, the practical development is narrower than the framing suggests: a select set of US advertisers can now extend Amazon campaigns into a pilot ad surface inside ChatGPT, with no self-serve access described and no measurement mechanics disclosed. The strategic development is larger. It marks a convergence of two of the most consequential shifts in the current advertising landscape, retail media's data advantage and conversational AI's claim on discovery, inside a single integration.

The forecasts temper the enthusiasm. According to EMARKETER, whose projections PPC Land reported in June, the standalone chatbot advertising category, the segment ChatGPT competes in directly, will generate less than $1 billion in US revenue in 2026, rising to just over $5 billion by 2030. More than 80% of AI advertising in 2026 is expected to appear next to AI content, such as search ads placed alongside AI-generated summaries, rather than inside chatbot conversations. Amazon is entering a fast-growing surface, but one that most independent analysts still expect to remain a minority of overall AI ad spend for years.

What the partnership does is give a retail media network with unmatched purchase data a foothold in the discovery layer that is drawing attention and dollars fastest. Whether that foothold delivers measurable performance, rather than presence, is the question the pilot exists to answer.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Amazon Ads and OpenAI, operator of ChatGPT, with Chris Conetta, Director of Omnichannel Supply at Amazon DSP, speaking for Amazon, and Delta Vacations, represented by President Katrin Koenig, among the first participating advertisers.

What: A partnership that lets select advertisers extend their existing Amazon Ads campaigns into a conversational ad experience inside ChatGPT, marketed as ChatGPT Ads and running as a pilot.

When: Announced September 10, 2026, with the pilot currently underway.

Where: The United States, limited to select advertisers.

Why: Amazon is positioning its retail media data inside the conversational surface where product discovery is increasingly happening, at a point where ChatGPT advertising has grown from a February 2026 test to a business crossing a $1 billion annualized run rate, while the attribution mechanics that would prove the channel's performance value remain unresolved.