Account Linking for Smart Home and Other Domains

All smart home and video skills must implement account linking to connect the identity of the Alexa user with an identity in the device cloud system. Some music skills also support account linking.

For an explanation of account linking concepts, see Account Linking Concepts. For the user experience, see How Users Experience Account Linking.

Prerequisites

To implement account linking for smart home skills, you must have the following prerequisites:

  • Your system must support OAuth 2.0 and the authorization code grant type.
    If you don't have your own authorization server, you can use Login with Amazon (LWA) or any OAuth 2.0 provider that has a certificate signed by an Amazon-approved certificate authority. Note that you cannot use https://letsencrypt.org/, even though it's on the certificate list.
  • Your OAuth provider must meet the Requirements for Account Linking.
  • If you enable the Send Alexa Events permission for the smart home skills, your skill must handle the AcceptGrant directive. If your skill doesn't handle this directive, account linking fails when the user attempts to enable your skill. For more details, see Request Access to the Alexa Event Gateway.

Steps to implement account linking

Follow the Steps to Implement Account Linking and use the authorization code grant type.

Validate the access token

Each directive sent to your skill includes the access token to identify the user. Your skill code needs to validate the token, and then use it to access information about the user. For more details, see the following topics:

Automated registration

With automated registration, your skill can allow users to automatically register with your system during device setup and link that identity with their Alexa identity. To learn more about this feature, contact your Amazon business representative or fill out the contact us form.

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Last updated: Jul 14, 2026