Amazon began buying ads on ChatGPT for the first time, becoming one of the highest-profile retailers in OpenAI’s emerging ad business, as spotted by e-commerce analyst Juozas Kaziukėnas. The ads link shoppers back to Amazon’s storefront, where the company controls the customer experience and transaction, as opposed to letting them checkout within ChatGPT’s interface.
Kaziukėnas wrote on a LinkedIn post:
“This feels symbolic because: Amazon is not participating in any shopping experiments by ChatGPT or other AI chat agents. In fact, they are actively blocking AI scrapers to break their functionality… Amazon and other retailers don’t want to be aggregated by ChatGPT but they will gladly buy ads on ChatGPT to bring users to their storefronts.”
A few days later, in a separate LinkedIn post, he reported:
“I’m now seeing the third iteration of ads in ChatGPT. The ad format is evolving to fit a larger image and take up less horizontal space (to fit multiple ads side by side; although, so far I’m still only seeing one ad at a time). They’ve got a few more ad formats coming soon, specifically for shopping. But I’d like to see AI-native ads, not just typical banners – Google is leading here with more creative ad integrations.”
Click those links above to see his original posts, which include screenshots of the ads themselves.
Last July, I reported that Amazon removed its entire Google Shopping advertising presence across all major markets for 31 days, marking one of the company’s most dramatic exits from Google’s retail ad ecosystem in recent history. Then in September, I reported that across 79,000+ keywords, Amazon lost 31% of its organic product card rankings, according to data from Audience Key. It seems that the hunt for customer acquisition channels is never over, even for leaders like Amazon.
