You have probably heard about Rufus, Amazon’s AI chatbot for customers.
Amazon’s Rufus is designed to field customer queries about potential products, and give out tailored recommendations.
You can ask Rufus “find me a well-priced coffee grinder,” for instance, and the AI chatbot will return personalized recommendations.
The idea is that, instead of forcing shoppers to spend hours combing through search results, Rufus can streamline the process.
That is shaking up how product discovery works on Amazon—and also, increasingly, how advertising works. Rufus has started showing Sponsored Ads in the middle of conversations with shoppers.
As more product discovery happens on Rufus, knowing how to optimize your product content for Rufus—and understanding how advertising happens—is going to be essential.
It’s early days still, but let’s break down what we know so far.
How important is Amazon’s Rufus?
Amazon hasn’t released data on how many shoppers use Rufus, but we do have some indications that Rufus is gaining traction.
A study from Ecomtent recently estimated that Rufus accounted for 13.7% of all Amazon’s searches in October 2024, the period for which they had data.
Sure, that means the vast majority of shoppers are still finding products the old way, through search terms in Amazon’s search bar.
But that 13.7% number is nothing to sneeze at—especially for brands that don’t rank as highly in traditional search results and want to find some alternate way to surface often to shoppers.
How does Amazon’s Rufus recommend products?
There’s a lot we don’t know about how Rufus works, but it does seem to tailor products to the purchase history of the individual shopper who is asking questions.
First, let’s start with the obvious: We’ve seen that highly rated products, with many reviews, tend to do best on Rufus.
The same is true for products with sophisticated and comprehensive content behind them. Good content is essential, because Rufus is ultimately pulling from your product content in order to decide when to recommend your product.
Now, let’s get to the slightly less obvious parts of Rufus.
As Forbes noted recently, traditional badges—like Amazon’s Choice—don’t seem to carry as much weight in Rufus’s product recommendations. Amazon seems to be putting a lot more focus on each customer’s individual purchase history than on other metrics of popularity.
On the topic of personalization: When it makes recommendations, Rufus also seems to be weighing each individual shopper’s own price preferences.
If you’re a shopper who tends to buy higher-priced items historically, Rufus seems to disproportionately recommend higher-priced items to you. However, if you’re much more price conscious, Rufus’s recommendations will stay low-price.
All of this suggests, as Kiri Masters wrote in Forbes, that brands with high-price products should pay particularly close attention to Rufus.
Because Rufus seems to be tailoring recommendations to people’s preferred price points, Rufus could be a great way to reach shoppers who are open to a more expensive purchase.
After all, those are the shoppers who probably need multiple touchpoints before they make a purchase—and they also are the shoppers who make spending on ads worth it.
Can I know if my ads are showing up in Rufus?
Increasingly, shoppers who use Rufus are reporting seeing Sponsored Ads in the middle of their conversations.
For now, these ads are mostly taking the form of Sponsored Products ads. Though, recently, even Sponsored Brands Video ads have started appearing in Rufus conversations.
As a brand, you only have so much say over these ads. Amazon announced in November that, when your ad appears in Rufus, Rufus reserves the right to include its own accompanying text.
But can you control your Rufus ad placements? The answer, for now, is no. Ads on Rufus are in the experimental phase. Individual brands are not able to specifically direct their ads to Rufus, and there’s no way to see exactly which of your ads are showing up on Rufus.
Rufus ads are grouped into the “Other” placement category. This category includes off-site placements, like Pinterest placements, as well.
So while you can’t see exactly how your ads are working on Rufus, you can get a high-level sense of how these slightly less traditional Sponsored Products placements are doing.
But really, there is a lot more to come on this front soon. It’s important to pay attention to new discoveries and announcements about Rufus. If you can get the jump on how Rufus works, you might find it becomes a differentiator for your business.
