In mid-September, Amazon Ads opened a pilot with OpenAI, letting select U.S. advertisers extend Amazon DSP campaigns into ChatGPT. Delta Vacations is among the first brands testing it.

That move tracks with what Amazon is already seeing on its own surfaces. Rufus monthly active users are up 115% year over year, and Amazon says shoppers who use Rufus are 60% more likely to complete a purchase than shoppers who don't. Amazon isn't guessing that conversational shopping converts. It has the data from its own product, and it's now testing whether that same behavior extends to a conversational surface it doesn't own.

A few things are still unsettled. You can't buy the specific ChatGPT ad placement yet outside this pilot, and attribution on a conversational surface, meaning how anyone measures whether a ChatGPT conversation led to a sale, hasn't been defined. Both of those are normal for a pilot this early, and neither should be the reason to wait on the part that's already actionable.

Conversational answers get assembled from structured product attributes, things like size, material, compatibility, who a product is for, and what it replaces. If a detail page can't answer a comparison question in plain language, there's nothing for an AI surface to pull from, whether that surface is ChatGPT, Rufus, or whatever comes next. That gap is free to close, and closing it already helps on Rufus today, regardless of whether your brand ever runs a DSP campaign inside ChatGPT.

The practical move for most brands right now isn't chasing pilot access. It's making sure the underlying product data would hold up if an AI surface came looking for it, since that work pays off on every AI-driven surface at once, not just the one getting the press release.

That's also the quieter story behind this pilot. Amazon is testing whether its own conversational shopping behavior, the kind that's already driving Rufus usage up 115% year over year, extends to a surface it has to share with another company. Whether or not that bet pays off for Amazon, the underlying habit it's betting on, shoppers describing what they want in plain language and expecting a direct answer, is already showing up across every AI surface a brand might encounter, not just the ones Amazon controls. Building product data that answers those questions clearly is work that holds its value regardless of which platform ends up winning the conversational shopping fight.

If you want help auditing your detail pages for the kind of structured data AI surfaces are reading, we're glad to walk through it with you.