Amazon is testing replacing the conventional search results with AI responses. When I searched for a CO2 monitor, it didn't show the expected product grid - the result was an AI generated summary and a few best sellers, plus a conversation box to keep chatting. "Show search results" takes me back to the default experience. (It doesn't have any Rufus branding, but I bet that's the same engine powering this) This made me think of Walmart because nearly a year ago they said, "We expect that the search bar and the conventional way of searching for items will be replaced by this multimodal interface in Sparky" (Hari Vasudev, CTO of Walmart U.S.) Amazon has never discussed this but they are aggressively pushing Rufus. This limited test is doing what Walmart said Sparky might do in the future. Bad news: it is slow. I sped up the video 2x to make it shorter but in real time it took more than 10 seconds to render the first product and more than 20 seconds to finish its response. This is horrible for a company infamous for calculating how every 100ms of latency costs millions in revenue. Sure it can get faster but no chatbot is yet as fast as near-instant traditional search. Good news: it had no ads. Which was refreshing because Amazon is so overloaded with them. (They'll inevitably be added here if this test grows up to be permanent) The response featured just three products with more options shown as backup choices. That changes the search ranking game completely.
Interesting shift this compresses visibility into a few spots instead of a full page. Speed will decide adoption, but ranking strategy may need a complete rethink.
And if you download the reports on current AI searches that include prompts that you never wanted to come up for your product, you will find that you're being billed for search queries that may or may not be contributing to the bottom line. So right now that is more bad news than good news for sellers.
for Amazon is all about conversions, it will generate friction, so I think it will live short.
Curious how this shift might impact smaller sellers. Could AI-overviews level the playing field or make it harder for niche products to gain visibility?
I propose we call these AAIO's - Amazon-ified AI Overviews.
Retailers can hypothesise all they want. The big question is whether conversion rates see a significant enough improvement with these changes, Juozas Kaziukėnas.
If this rolls out, the entire keyword-first listing strategy becomes secondary overnight. Three products in the AI response versus thousands in traditional search, that's not a ranking shift, that's a visibility cliff. The brands optimizing for Rufus signals right now are building the only moat that will matter. The latency problem is the only thing buying sellers time to adapt
AI search doesn’t kill SEO. It just makes mediocre listings invisible faster.
I already trust RUFUS results way more than typical A9 results. They are moving in the right direction.