Retail media, search advertising, and AI: the boundary is thinning
The boundary between retail media, search advertising, and artificial intelligence is getting thinner by the day.
On 10 September 2026, Amazon Ads announced a new integration with OpenAI that will allow advertisers to extend their campaigns into ChatGPT Ads.
The project is currently in pilot and involves selected advertisers in the United States, but the strategic implications of the announcement are far broader.
Amazon no longer wants to be only the place where a purchase is completed. It wants to use its advertising technology to support brands across an increasingly broad portion of the customer journey. And that journey is starting to shift into conversations with artificial intelligence as well.
What Amazon Ads announced
Amazon Ads confirmed on 10 September a partnership with OpenAI through which some advertisers can extend Amazon Ads campaigns into a conversational advertising experience within ChatGPT.
Amazon describes the integration as an opportunity to reach users in environments where they are already spending time and making decisions.
For now, the test is limited to selected advertisers in the United States. This does not mean any European Amazon advertiser can already automatically activate ChatGPT campaigns from their account. But the direction is extremely clear.
Why ChatGPT matters so much to advertisers
The biggest difference between ChatGPT and many traditional media platforms is context.
A person scrolling a social feed may be in a mostly passive mode. A person querying ChatGPT, by contrast, is often explicitly expressing a problem or an intent.
They might ask which stroller is best for flying, which coffee machine works best in a small office, or how to choose an air conditioner for a room of a certain size. These conversations can contain signals that are very close to the consideration stage. That is exactly where the potential of conversational advertising comes from.
ChatGPT Ads has also arrived in Europe
Amazon’s announcement comes at a particularly interesting moment. OpenAI had announced on 18 August the expansion of ChatGPT Ads into 31 European markets, including Italy.
From 31 August 2026, self-service access via Ads Manager is also available in the announced European markets.
This means two highly relevant advertising ecosystems are beginning to converge: on one side Amazon, with signals tied to search, shopping, and purchase; on the other ChatGPT, with conversations that express needs, problems, and intent.
Amazon Ads is no longer just advertising inside Amazon
This is arguably the most important point in the entire news cycle.
For years, Amazon Advertising was understood mainly through Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display: I sell on Amazon, I buy ads on Amazon, I generate sales on Amazon.
Amazon DSP had already started to break that relationship, allowing brands to use Amazon’s infrastructure to reach audiences outside the marketplace. The ChatGPT integration pushes this logic even further.
Amazon Ads is progressively becoming an omnichannel adtech infrastructure, built around the ability to understand users’ commercial behavior.
From search advertising to conversational advertising
For twenty years, search advertising was built largely around a sequence: keyword, ad, click, landing page.
Artificial intelligence introduces a different structure: need, conversation, recommendation, deep dive, choice.
This fundamentally changes the context in which an ad message can appear. Advertising does not necessarily have to interrupt the experience: in theory, it can appear at the moment a user is trying to solve a problem.
And this is where Amazon has a potentially important advantage: its understanding of commercial behavior.
Why Amazon data and conversational AI are a powerful combination
Amazon has signals that a typical advertising platform can hardly replicate in full. It knows which categories are searched, which products are compared, which are purchased, which products are bought together, and how often some customers repurchase.
If those signals are used inside conversational experiences, in accordance with the relevant privacy rules and the operating modes defined by the platforms, the very concept of targeting can evolve.
We are no longer talking only about reaching a person who belongs to a certain audience. We are talking about reaching a person at the moment they are expressing a need.
What changes today for an Amazon advertiser?
In the near term, for most European advertisers, probably very little. The integration between Amazon Ads and ChatGPT is still limited.
But strategically, it changes a great deal. Brands should start thinking about Amazon Advertising not as a separate budget reserved for the marketplace, but as one component of a broader media strategy.
This means analyzing incremental reach, new-to-brand customers, consideration, audience overlap, customer journey, lifetime value, and cross-channel measurement.
Metrics like ACOS and ROAS will remain important. But on their own, they will be increasingly insufficient to describe the total impact of the Amazon Ads ecosystem.
A new problem: how do you measure a conversational conversion?
If someone discovers a product during a conversation with an AI assistant, then later searches for it on Google, visits Amazon, and buys three days later. Which channel truly generated the sale?
The last click? The conversation? The later search? The brand’s presence on Amazon?
This makes measurement infrastructure such as Amazon Marketing Cloud even more important, together with models capable of observing more complex customer journeys. The growth of AI advertising could therefore make traditional attribution even less representative of real consumer behavior.
Amazon, OpenAI, and the future of product discovery
For years, online product discovery has happened primarily through three doors: Google, marketplaces, and social networks. Artificial intelligence is creating a fourth door: conversation.
Users are starting to ask AI systems directly which product to choose, what the differences are between two alternatives, and which solution is best for a particular problem.
For brands, this means the competition of the future will not be only “How do we rank #1 in the Amazon SERP?”, but also “How do we become one of the alternatives that artificial intelligence considers relevant when a consumer expresses a need?”.
Advertising, SEO, product information, and brand authority will inevitably begin to converge.
Amazon Ads + ChatGPT is only the beginning
The integration announced on 10 September should not be read simply as the launch of a new ad placement. It is a far more important indicator of where the market is going.
Amazon is pushing its advertising infrastructure increasingly far beyond the marketplace boundaries. ChatGPT is transforming conversations into a new commercial environment. And brands are preparing to compete in an ecosystem where search, commerce, retail media, and artificial intelligence will be less and less separable.
The interesting question is not whether we will buy ads inside a chatbot in the future. The question is: how much of the product decision-making process will start directly from a conversation with artificial intelligence?