One of my top takeaways from our most recent eCommerce Organizational Benchmark report: the exponential age is driving a crisis in confidence among brands. Despite countless exciting innovations to help brands reach shoppers, only 50% of executives surveyed told us they feel caught up or ahead of the curve – the lowest we’ve measured.
Figuring out how to fold AI developments, retail media growth and shifting consumer behaviors into a brand strategy is enough to challenge even the most sophisticated teams. But our latest research shows that focusing on the digital shelf fundamentals – search, content, reviews – is still the highest ROI strategy:
Reliably driving strong visibility and conversion is the core foundation of sales growth in the long term, and Amazon’s recent shopper-facing AI and personalization changes are perfect examples of why getting the basics right continues to pay outsize dividends. For consumers, these features make discovery and decision-making easier. For brands, they present exciting growth opportunities for well-prepared teams but heighten the risk of falling behind for brands getting the fundamentals wrong.
Since introducing Rufus in the U.S. earlier this year and expanding it to the U.K. in September, Amazon has steadily found more ways to embed its conversational AI throughout the shopper experience. In addition to finding a permanent home on the desktop site and mobile app, Rufus appears in the search bar, at the top of the PDP, and above the ratings & reviews section for a product. That means Rufus can drive both visibility and conversion dynamics.
Visibility
One of Rufus’s main jobs is to educate shoppers who aren’t sure what to buy and recommend specific products they might like, based on the user’s prompt.
This is a new path for brands to earn organic visibility outside the increasingly difficult battle for page 1. So how can brands maximize the likelihood Rufus suggests their products in its conversations with buyers? Since Rufus learns about your product’s value proposition from the PDP, the answer is to “teach” it about your products by adding comprehensive PDP content and sourcing additional reviews for your products. Brands that have already invested in content and reviews have a big head start.
Conversion
Amazon is also encouraging users to consult Rufus on the PDP itself. On the desktop site, a new “Search this page” link brings consumers down to the Q&A and reviews section, where Rufus offers an AI-enhanced search bar with specific prompts to help users learn about the product, decide if it’s right for them, and eventually convert. Here too, the more reviews on a product, the more helpful Rufus is likely to be.
Rufus isn’t the only reason to invest in detailed, informative PDPs. The latest iteration of Amazon’s search algorithm (COSMO) aims to understand and address the shopper’s motivation for the search (e.g., if I search “camping trip essentials”, it would source products relevant to that activity, even without an exact keyword match).
For brands, this means keyword-based search optimization is just step 1. There’s now additional growth opportunity in attracting buyers who don’t know exactly what they’re looking for. Optimizing for COSMO means building out PDPs that describe in detail not just what the product is, but what it’s for, who might use it, what it’s used with, and in what contexts (hint: think tentpole events). Product reviews can be a gold mine of use case examples.
If this advice sounds familiar, it’s because detail-rich content refreshed for key seasonal events is already a best practice used by leading brands to drive PDP conversion. Now, it’s poised to play a greater role in visibility as well.
You’re probably familiar with personalized Amazon deals and product recommendations, but what about personalized descriptions within a single listing?
Amazon knows a lot about individual shoppers from the data it collects on shopping and browsing history. Now, they’ve taken the next step by tailoring and/or rearranging product titles and descriptions to highlight the most relevant keywords for each shopper.
Source: Amazon
Similar to Rufus, the AI that customizes these content fields is only as good as the information it has to work with. Brands can help ensure consumers get the most accurate and effective personalized view by including relevant product features in their descriptions.
And with live content now serving as the jumping-off point for Amazon’s AI, it’s more critical than ever for brands to continuously track the accuracy of live content against their internal source of truth. We’ve seen brands discover that over 50% of their live content was wrong across their Amazon portfolio. That’s a huge problem on its own, but an even bigger risk when AI gets involved.
Across a range of products including TVs, apparel and appliances, Amazon is deploying large language models (LLMs) to generate category buying guides that combine informational summaries, feature breakdowns, and product recommendations in one view. On the mobile app, these guides appear automatically from the search bar.
While it’s not clear exactly how the LLM chooses products for the buying guide, there’s no guarantee a category’s top-performing products will automatically get the nod. For brands, it’s worth doing some investigation – locate your category’s buying guide (if it has one) and note what product features Amazon prioritizes for the guide. Then, check whether your products are represented or not, and whether buying guide representation appears to track with KPIs like sales or share of search.
Amazon hasn’t neglected to tweak the traditional search path. In categories such as toys, electronics and appliances, the mobile app now plays product videos as shoppers scroll through search results. Brands that have invested in high-quality product videos have an opportunity to drive increased traffic to their PDPs if Amazon promotes their content to search results, where the videos stand out from the usual static text and images.
For brands looking to succeed in a rapidly changing Amazon marketplace, the key is to stay focused on excelling at the fundamentals. That means:
Many brands are lagging in one or several of these core areas – if that’s you, now is the time to get serious about your PDPs. Ideally, optimizing the fundamentals should be an ongoing effort rather than a one-off push. Our latest industry survey found that leading brands monitor search performance more frequently than other brands and allocate dedicated resources to improving their product content.
Profitero is a key partner in this effort for thousands of brands around the world. Our digital shelf suite features an end-to-end Amazon solution, including:
If you’re interested in learning about how Profitero’s tools can help your brand implement a successful Amazon strategy in 2025, book a demo with our team. We’d love to chat with you!