The news: Amazon Publisher Services is talking with some sites and outside firms to see how it could help power ads within chatbots, two sources told The Information.

Moving into the chatbot ad arena could help Amazon bolster its ad business. Although its ad revenues grew about 23% YoY in Q4 2025, they remain behind competitors like Google and Meta.

Chatbot ad tech from Amazon could also let platforms monetize chatbot offerings and extend Amazon’s influence beyond retail media. It would also give Amazon more data on user behavior outside its own services, per The Information, and help it stake a claim in the digital ad market that’s centered on AI-driven interactions.

Why it matters: Ads in chatbots remain a nascent offering and could risk disrupting the user experience—Perplexity pulled back from ads over concerns that they could cause users to question the objectivity of AI answers.

If chatbots carry paid placements, platforms will need to balance monetization with user trust. Over time, conversational ads could change performance marketing by blending discovery, recommendations, and transactions into a single AI-mediated location.

An Amazon chatbot ad offering could also position to compete for ad dollars with OpenAI, which launched ads within ChatGPT in February, per The Information.

• Unlike OpenAI, Amazon brings hefty experience in ad tech infrastructure, advertiser relationships, and performance measurement, which could make its tools more scalable and attractive to brands outside of ChatGPT.
• Amazon’s track record in ad integration may give it a clearer path to commercially viable AI ads.

Recommendations for brands: Monitor emerging players in the AI ad tech market to assess which partners could best help integrate marketing within on-site and in-app chatbots. A strong presence in conversational answers could boost visibility in the user purchase and discovery journey outside of social and search, capturing attention as genAI usage grows.