In the space of three weeks, Amazon Ads announced a way to ask your buyers for reviews, a partnership that puts Amazon campaigns inside ChatGPT, and an ad product for plumbers and restaurants. They look unrelated, but all three launched as betas, pilots or API-only releases, and none of them fits the Sponsored Products routine most sellers run today.

At a glance

Review Requests: ads that ask buyers for a rating

Review Requests is the one most Amazon sellers will care about. It places a native "How was your item?" card on high-traffic Amazon pages, inviting a verified purchaser to leave a star rating or a written review. Amazon’s pitch is the cold-start problem: shoppers hesitate to buy products with few reviews, but reviews take time to build and buyers rarely leave them unprompted.

According to Amazon’s API documentation, billing is cost per click, and the billable click is a shopper leaving a rating or review on the card. Impressions and cards that are seen but not answered are free. You control spend with a bid, which is the most you will pay per billable click, and a daily budget. Several third-party write-ups say Amazon has not stated the billing unit, and at least one reports a model where a click that does not end in a review can still be charged. The developer documentation says otherwise, so check it in your own account before you commit budget.

Who can use it

• Registered sellers and vendors with an advertising account in good standing.

• Products with fewer than 1,000 total ratings and reviews. Eligibility is checked at creation and while the campaign runs, and ads for a product pause automatically once it reaches 1,000.

• The US only, in beta.

How it works

In the API, a Review Requests campaign is a Sponsored Products campaign with its goal set to ENGAGEMENT, which cannot be changed later. Each ad group needs one fixed target (a theme target with the "interested audience" match type), and each ad covers a single product, so you create one ad per ASIN. There is no keyword, product or audience targeting. Amazon decides which recent buyers see the card, and advertisers cannot select shoppers or influence the star rating they give. Reporting adds five review-specific metrics to the usual delivery metrics: reviews, written reviews, rating-only reviews, percent of reviews written, and average star rating.

What Amazon has claimed, and what is unclear

Amazon says products in early testing received around three times as many ratings and reviews each week. Third-party coverage cites a US closed beta in June 2026. That is Amazon’s own before-and-after comparison, and it has not published how many products took part, what they spent, or whether any comparison group ran without the ad. Enough reason to test, and no basis for a forecast.

Timing is also muddy. Amazon’s announcement says an open beta in late October, another Amazon post says November, and early access has reportedly been limited to the API. The documentation describes creating campaigns through the API, while some third-party coverage says they can also be managed in Amazon Ads Agent. Check what your account actually shows.

Separately, Amazon prohibits influencing the ratings buyers give. The ad invites a rating, not a good one, and nothing you send alongside it should steer buyers toward five stars. The same rules that already govern product inserts and follow-up messages apply here.

ChatGPT Ads: Amazon campaigns reach into conversational AI

On September 10, 2026, Amazon Ads announced a partnership with OpenAI to support advertising in ChatGPT. The idea is that advertisers can extend their existing Amazon Ads campaigns with a conversational ad experience inside ChatGPT, reaching people as they explore options, compare choices and decide. Select advertisers in the US are testing it now as a pilot, and Delta Vacations is one early brand quoted in the announcement.

The announcement is positioned around Amazon’s programmatic advertising, the Amazon DSP side of the business. Sponsored Products, which is what most sellers manage, goes unmentioned. Amazon describes conversational ads as the "fastest growing engagement opportunity" for brands, and its pitch to advertisers is the usual one: its shopping, browsing and streaming signals, applied to a new place where people spend time.

What the announcement does not say is most of what an advertiser would need to decide: ad formats, where in a conversation ads appear, targeting options, pricing and buying model, how performance is measured, how to join the pilot, or when it will be available more widely. Trade press has since reported a managed-service model with both cost-per-click and cost-per-thousand pricing, text-and-image units below ChatGPT responses with a sponsored label, and OpenAI’s system deciding which ads appear. Amazon has confirmed none of it, so until it publishes the details there is little to plan around beyond watching for them.

Sponsored Services: ads for plumbers, restaurants and salons

Sponsored Services is the least relevant to product sellers and the most different from anything Amazon has offered before. It is a performance advertising product for local and online service providers, such as plumbers, electricians, landscapers, restaurants and beauty salons. The ad drives an outcome in place of a product sale: a quote request, a phone call or a food order.

The ads appear when a shopper buys or searches for something related to a service. Amazon’s example is a plumber recommendation appearing on the page of a kitchen faucet, with Call and Quote buttons, and a short in-ad flow that qualifies the request and passes the customer’s details to the business without the shopper leaving Amazon. Trade press has reported early placements for Yelp-listed plumbers and roofers on order confirmation pages. The same idea extends to Alexa+: Amazon’s examples show a sponsored restaurant appearing in an Alexa+ conversation about ordering dinner, followed by ordering and an order confirmation on an Echo Show.

How advertisers use it

• Bidding: cost per outcome, so you pay per defined outcome instead of per click.

• Setup: a business profile (name, description, category, services and service area) plus a campaign with a budget.

• Lead delivery: outcomes reach your own CRM or lead system through a webhook.

• Reporting: impressions, clicks, outcomes, click-through rate, outcome rate, cost per outcome, spend and outcome type.

Availability is narrow. It is US only, open to local service providers in eligible verticals (home services and restaurants, with more coming), agencies managing local service portfolios, and third-party marketplace partners. Access is through the Amazon Ads Unified API in the fourth quarter of 2026, with the Ads Console following in 2027.

Most of our readers will not run it. The more practical implication is ours, and Amazon has not said it: if service providers can advertise on product pages like a faucet listing, product detail pages may carry more non-product ads competing for the shopper’s attention.

What to do about all this

• Review Requests: act soon. List the products with fewer than 1,000 reviews where review count is the visible gap against competitors and price and content are already competitive. Confirm the billing unit and availability in your account, test with a small budget, and track reviews per week, average rating and conversion rate before and during the campaign.

• ChatGPT Ads: watch. Ask your Amazon Ads representative whether your account can join the pilot, and wait for pricing, formats and measurement before allocating budget.

• Sponsored Services: monitor. Unless you manage service businesses, there is nothing to launch. Note the direction: Amazon is now building ad products around conversations and outcomes as well as product listings, and that will show up in your regular advertising audits as new placements and new competition on the detail page.

Final word

Of the three, only Review Requests touches the campaigns most sellers run today, and it comes with a clear test: pick the products under 1,000 reviews where the count is what holds conversion back, and run a small budget against them. The other two are calendar reminders for now. Amazon is moving its ad surface into conversations and off the product page, and the accounts that notice early will have data by the time everyone else arrives.

Want a list of which of your ASINs qualify for Review Requests and what a first test should cost? Send us your catalog and we will run it alongside your account.