Amazon’s first Rufus ad placements are free for now but hard to measure

Amazon is not yet charging for sponsored prompts inside its Rufus AI shopping assistant, according to agencies managing Amazon campaigns, but brands are already paying for sponsored product ads within Rufus that they cannot isolate in reporting.

Commerce media columnist Kiri Masters, who spoke to leaders at four agencies, argues that brands are at once “paying for something they can’t measure and being offered something free they can’t optimize”.

Masters had previously reported research showing that Rufus drove almost all of Amazon’s incremental holiday growth, with shopping sessions that used AI converting 3.5 times as often as ordinary ones. On its 2025 earnings call, Amazon said Rufus contributed $12bn in annualised incremental gross merchandise value.

How sponsored prompts work

Amazon launched sponsored prompts late last year. The format places AI-generated questions next to the assistant’s conversational answers, while sponsored product ads had begun appearing even earlier.

Advertisers have little control. Amazon decides which prompts can be sponsored based on product detail page (PDP) content. Brands can see which prompts are running and opt out of individual ones, but cannot write their own, bid on specific placements or set a separate budget.

Ross Walker, head of retail media at Acadia, said a new “prompts” tab now sits alongside the performance and video tabs within sponsored products campaigns. For one haircare client, the prompts asked whether the product protected against heat and whether it got rid of frizz, both drawn from the listing. The number of prompts per campaign ranges from none to four, with no clear reason for the difference.

“It’s a bit of an interesting approach because, rather than a typical ads platform where the user researches and tests various targeting approaches, Rufus prompts that are available to advertise against are pre-determined by Amazon and are opt-out only,” said Danny Silverman, executive vice-president of digital commerce at MPG.

Volumes are small. Walker cited about 12,000 impressions on one prompt across 65 days, producing single-digit clicks. Matt Winder, vice-president of media at Voyageur Group, said prompts are not appearing consistently across his agency’s client accounts.

Where prompts do appear, engagement is strong. “Prompts behave most like video ads. They pull people in, drive engagement and often generate strong CTRs,” said Cody Tusberg, executive vice-president of connected commerce at Acosta Group. Walker said click-through rates were competitive with typical sponsored product ads despite the low volumes.

Spend that cannot be seen

Standard sponsored product ads are also showing up inside Rufus answers as part of normal delivery, and brands are paying for them. But Amazon does not report Rufus as a separate placement, so advertisers cannot tell how much budget goes there, how it performs against conventional search results or whether conversion behaves differently.

On sponsored prompts, none of the four agencies has yet seen a charge, though sales are starting to be attributed. Walker noted purchases tracked to prompt interactions with no spend attached, which suggests Amazon wants an attribution track record in place before it starts charging. “There is no cost as of now, so there is no spend-based KPI to compare against,” Silverman said.

How to benchmark prompts once they are priced is unclear. Walker would compare them with top-of-search placements, which occupy similar space and funnel position, while Tusberg would compare them with video ads because of how people engage.

Interest from brands varies. Silverman said all his brands ask about it, but with no cost and automatic opt-in, conversations mostly involve checking what is available. Walker said clients ask him less about Rufus prompts than about newer DSP inventory such as streaming, or about video in sponsored products. Winder described brands as “more indifferent than eager.”

A different discovery engine

Meanwhile, Rufus is building a parallel discovery system that works differently from Amazon search. Research by the Mars Agency comparing Rufus answers with page-one search results for the same queries found that only 22% of page-one products also appeared in Rufus, and 36% of Rufus’s recommendations were not on page one at all. Masters says Rufus appears to prioritise perceived relevance and context rather than keyword rank and sales velocity.

Brooke Doepke, chief operating officer at Voyageur Group, said preparation starts before advertising. Her team optimises listings for what she calls “AI readiness”, structuring copy, images, creative and back-end data to answer the core questions that shape both Rufus’s organic recommendations and which prompts can be sponsored. The approach adapts search engine optimisation for what the industry is beginning to call answer engine optimisation, or AEO.

At Acosta Group, Tusberg’s team is checking keyword campaigns and product pages against the language that appears in sponsored prompts. If Rufus asks whether a product eliminates frizz and the listing does not make that claim prominently, there is a gap to fix. Masters notes that Amazon is effectively showing brands, for free, which questions its AI considers most important for each product.

What it could reshape

Masters links this to agentic advertising, the model being developed for AI environments by companies such as Scope3, in which ads are aimed at context and content instead of individuals and search terms. The Mars Agency data, she argues, shows that shift is already under way inside the largest retail media platform, not just on ChatGPT and other external AI services.

Because Rufus and its sponsored prompts match products to conversational context rather than keyword bids, the keyword research, rank tracking and bid management brands have built over a decade are geared to a system Amazon is now supplementing with something different. She describes the 78% of page-one products missing from Rufus results as a preview of contextual relevance displacing keyword dominance.

Waiting for the switch

Masters says Rufus ads do not fit existing measurement frameworks, and the unit of value may be moving from a search placement to inclusion in the assistant’s answer. Sponsored prompts are the first concrete sign of that.

The agencies handling billions in Amazon ad spend are mostly waiting to see what happens. Masters says that is understandable, but points out that Amazon has repeatedly seeded a format, built the infrastructure quietly and then scaled it quickly, as it did with streaming ads, DSP and Sponsored Products, leaving late movers to pay a premium.

She argues that AI’s disruption of retail media is arriving not as one dramatic event but “as a new tab in the ad console that most brands are scrolling past”, and that the numbers will not stay small.