Amazon’s AI-sponsored prompts: when your ad becomes the answer

Amazon has quietly crossed an important line in retail media: your “ad” is no longer just a tile on a page. It is starting to show up as the actual answer inside an AI assistant.

At Unboxed 2025, Amazon announced Sponsored Products prompts and Sponsored Brands prompts, an AI-powered layer that sits on top of your existing campaigns and turns them into conversational experiences. These prompts use Amazon’s first-party signals and your own content to act like a 24/7 product expert that jumps in at key decision moments in the shopping journey. 

If you work in performance, retail media, or marketplace brands, this is not just another format update. It is a shift in how paid, organic, and AI all merge into one experience.

This piece breaks down what Amazon is actually doing, why it matters, and how you should adapt your strategy before this rolls out at scale.

First, what did Amazon actually launch?

From Amazon’s own announcement, here is the simple version. 

• Sponsored Products prompts and Sponsored Brands prompts are new AI-driven variations on your existing campaigns.

• They use signals from your product detail pages, Brand Store, campaign data, and other first-party inputs to answer shopper questions or proactively surface useful information.

• In this beta phase, they are free to advertisers and automatically enabled on Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns in the US.

• Reporting will show prompt text, associated ad, and performance metrics like impressions, clicks, and orders, with controls to review and opt out.

Think of it as Amazon taking your PDP content, brand assets, and historical campaign data, feeding it into an AI layer, and then letting that AI decide when and how to speak to shoppers on your behalf.

So far, this is positioned as a helpful “virtual product expert” that reduces friction and speeds up decision-making for shoppers. 

But to understand the real implications, you have to look at how these prompts are already showing up inside Rufus, Amazon’s AI shopping assistant.

How sponsored prompts show up inside Rufus

Rufus is Amazon’s generative AI shopping assistant that answers questions, compares products, and recommends items using Amazon’s catalogue and information from across the web. 

Over the past year, agencies and brands started noticing something new: little sponsored questions appearing on product detail pages, powered by Rufus. Examples include: 

• “Why choose [brand]’s [product type]?”

• “What is unique about [brand]’s [product type]?”

When a shopper clicks these, the response is generated by Rufus, not your fixed PDP copy. The assistant pulls from your product information, customer reviews, Brand posts, and even data from Sponsored Products campaigns, sometimes even when the campaign did not target that specific product page. 

In other words:

• The prompt is a sponsored surface.

• The answer is a blended AI summary of everything Amazon knows about you.

• The placement sits inside a high-intent, question-driven environment, not just a list of ad tiles. 

That is a very different model from “bid on a keyword, show an ad, track a click.”

Why this is bigger than “one more ad format”

There are three big shifts hiding inside this update.

1. The line between paid and organic is getting blurry

Traditional Amazon Ads are easy to understand. You pay for a slot, you get a sponsored label, and you optimise around CPC and ROAS.

In the Rufus world, visibility is shaped by:

• How clearly do your PDPs explain value?

• How consistent is your story across PDPs, Brand Store, and Brand posts?

• How well does that content align with what shoppers are asking in natural language? 

Bid strategy still matters, but content quality and structure suddenly become a growth lever, not just basic hygiene.

2. “AI search” and retail media are converging

Retail media has always been powerful because it sits at the moment of purchase. Amazon has already grown into one of the three major digital ad players by connecting ads directly to buying intent. 

With Rufus and sponsored prompts, Amazon is now combining:

• Search intent

• First-party purchase data

• Generative AI that can personalise answers in real time 

That makes these prompts feel closer to a conversational PPC unit than a static banner. For marketers, this is effectively a new “AI-native” performance channel inside Amazon.

3. Brand safety and trust now live inside the answer

Because the answer is AI-generated, you are no longer just approving a creative and a headline. You are trusting Amazon’s model to summarise your reviews, PDPs, and brand assets correctly.

That can be powerful, but it also raises questions:

• Will the AI over-index on negative reviews if they get a lot of engagement?

• Will shoppers recognise that certain answers are sponsored, or will it feel like neutral guidance?

• How will regulators view advertising embedded inside AI outputs, especially when transparency is not obvious?

Early conversations around AI search ads on other platforms already show user frustration when ads are blended too tightly into “helpful” answers. 

If you are a brand, you cannot ignore this. Your paid presence is becoming part of the interface itself.

What smart brands should do next?

You cannot control every detail of Amazon’s roadmap. But you can control how prepared your brand is when AI-shaped journeys become the default.

Here are four practical shifts.

1. Treat PDP content like prompt engineering

Rufus answers are built from your product detail pages, Brand Store, customer reviews, and campaign data. 

So your PDP is no longer just a place to tick SEO and asset boxes. It is effectively training data.

Focus on:

• Clear, conversational copy that answers real questions a shopper would type into a chat.

• Strong “why this product” and “who this is for” sections that can be lifted into AI answers.

• Consistent benefit language across PDPs, Brand Store, and Brand posts, so the model sees one coherent story.

If your content is vague, generic, or inconsistent, Rufus will simply have less to work with.

2. Build a measurement plan around prompts

Amazon will surface reporting for prompts inside the Ads Console, including impressions, clicks, and orders, with the ability to opt out if needed. 

When this unlocks, do not just look at CTR in isolation. Instead:

• Compare performance for campaigns with high prompt engagement versus those with low engagement.

• Look at assisted conversions where prompts appear earlier in the journey rather than just last-click wins.

• Watch for categories where prompts perform disproportionately well, which may indicate shopper comfort with conversational help.

This will feel closer to evaluating on-site search plus paid search than simple display or static retail media.

3. Create internal guardrails for AI answers

Even if you cannot directly edit Rufus's responses, you can still define your own rules of engagement.

As a starting point:

• Decide which categories or hero SKUs you are comfortable pushing into AI-heavy surfaces.

• Identify sensitive claims or topics where you want extra monitoring of how the AI describes you.

• Set up a recurring audit where you and your marketplace team literally “talk to” Rufus with the most common questions in your category and capture how your brand shows up. 

If the answers feel off, that is a signal to improve your PDP content, reviews strategy, or brand assets. You may not be able to rewrite the AI, but you can change the inputs it sees.

4. Align marketplace, brand, and performance teams

Rufus sponsored prompts that cut across silos.

• Marketplace teams control PDPs, logistics, and catalogue health.

• Brand teams own narrative, messaging, and visual identity.

• Performance teams manage bids, budgets, and optimisation.

AI-native ad formats like sponsored prompts only work if all three are in sync. The days of “just run sponsored products on top of whatever PDP is live” are numbered.

The bigger picture: AI ads are moving inside the interface

Amazon is not alone in this direction. We are already seeing search and chat platforms experiment with sponsored suggestions, conversational ad units, and AI-generated recommendations that blend content and commerce. 

The interesting part is not that ads are appearing in AI chats. It is that:

• The format is shifting from rectangles to answers.

• The creative is shifting from individual assets to system-level content.

• The levers are shifting from pure bidding to a mix of content quality, structure, and signals.

For brands that are prepared, this can feel like an unfair advantage. If your PDPs are rich, your reviews are strong, and your story is consistent, AI assistants like Rufus are more likely to speak about you clearly and convincingly.

For brands that are under-investing in content and still treating Amazon as “just another channel,” this will expose gaps quickly.

Where to go from here

If you are already advertising on Amazon, you do not need to rebuild your strategy overnight. But you cannot treat Sponsored Prompts as a quiet beta forever.

In the next quarter, you can:

• Pick a handful of key SKUs and treat them as your AI-first test bed.

• Upgrade their PDPs with question-driven copy, stronger benefit framing, and consistent language across assets.

• Start capturing Rufus answers and prompt level performance as its reporting opens up.

The platforms will keep changing their AI surfaces. What you control is the quality of what those systems see when they look at your brand.

And in a world where your ad is also the answer, that might be the only real edge you have.