The news: Amazon has begun buying ads on ChatGPT, a move first reported by Marketplace Pulse founder Juozas Kaziukėnas.

The move is notable because Amazon has aggressively blocked several OpenAI-affiliated crawlers and other third-party agents from accessing its site.

But while the retail giant doesn’t want ChatGPT aggregating its product data, it appears to have no problem using ads to drive users back to its own platform, where it can control the experience, monetize traffic, and drive spending.

During Amazon’s most recent earnings call, CEO Andy Jassy noted that the experience with third-party agents “hasn’t gotten great.” He pointed to struggles with inaccurate pricing, incomplete product information, and a lack of personalization tied to shoppers’ histories. Despite those shortcomings, Amazon clearly sees the channel as too important to ignore.

The context: Amazon and OpenAI have a complicated relationship.

Amazon last year updated its robots.txt file to block ChatGPT-User, the agent used to pull live web data for responses, and OAI-SearchBot, which powers OpenAI’s SearchGPT engine, from scraping its site.

At the same time, the companies are becoming closer partners. In November, OpenAI signed a $38 billion agreement with Amazon Web Services, marking its first major contract with the cloud provider. Amazon deepened that relationship months later, announcing a $50 billion investment in OpenAI. As part of the deal, the companies agreed to develop customized models for Amazon’s customer-facing applications, while OpenAI expanded its AWS spending commitment by $100 billion.

Implications for retailers and brands: Amazon’s investment in ChatGPT ads reflects a desire to avoid leaving money on the table. While it is still early days for agentic commerce, roughly 1 in 5 US genAI assistant users are open to AI advertising and/or agentic AI commerce, per Mod7 Research Strategy.

More importantly, the move gives Amazon a chance to gather valuable data that can inform and strengthen its own ad platform. The company is already pushing consumers toward its in-house tools, folding Rufus into Alexa+ under “Alexa for Shopping” and promoting features like personalized deal guides, price tracking, and auto-purchasing during Prime Day. Amazon argues that its advantage lies in its depth of first-party data, and it is building on that by introducing Sponsored Products and Brand Prompts within its own agentic experience. In early tests, nearly 20% of shoppers who interacted with Brand Prompts continued the conversation about that brand.

Buying ad inventory on ChatGPT could also give Amazon influence over how the channel evolves. That mirrors its approach to Google Shopping, where decisions to ramp up ad spend or pull back product feeds have had an outsize impact on pricing and competitive dynamics.