Helium 10 can tell you your CTR dropped.
It can't tell you it's because an AI named Alexa, now answers your shoppers' questions before they reach your listing—and you have no idea what it's saying about you.
ECOMMERCE NEWS
Last week we told you Rufus could buy for you. This week the bigger move: Amazon retired the Rufus brand entirelyand folded its shopping agent into Alexa+, launching "Alexa for Shopping" on May 13. Same AI brain, much bigger body — one persistent shopper profile that follows the customer across Amazon.com, the Shopping app, Alexa.com, and every Echo device.
This isn't a rename you can ignore until next quarter. The AI icon is rolling into 80% of US search result pages starting May 20 — so by the time you read this, most of your shoppers are seeing it.
🖼️ The bigger picture
Amazon isn't experimenting anymore — it's committing. Andy Jassy says Rufus drove roughly $12 billion in incremental sales in 2025, with monthly active users up 115% and engagement up nearly 400% year over year. Merging it into Alexa ties the agent to 600 million+ Alexa endpoints and ~300 million US shoppers. The shopping layer is no longer a search box you've spent a decade learning to game — it's a conversation you're not invited to.
🖊️ What to do
Two things changed that hit your account directly.
Second, the model leans hard on review volume, review recency, and conversational language when it decides what to recommend. Read your top listings out loud as a question a shopper would ask ("what's a good X for Y?") and make sure your copy answers it in plain language. You get no visibility into why the AI surfaces you or your competitor, so the only lever you control is making your listing the easiest, best-reviewed answer to a spoken question.
First, active Sponsored Products campaigns are auto-eligible to surface inside Alexa+ conversations — no separate opt-in, so check that your campaigns and budgets can handle exposure you didn't manually turn on.
AMAZON NEWS
There's a quiet pricing change that can strip the strikethrough off your listing without touching your actual price.
As of May 18, 2026, if a product sits below its non-promotional median for more than half of any 90-day window, Amazon will calculate your Typical Price using all sales — including promotional ones.
Translation: if you're discounting more often than not, your "sale" price becomes your normal price in Amazon's eyes. You keep every bit of control over what you charge — you just lose the ability to show it as a discount. No reference price, no strikethrough, no savings badge.
💸 What it costs you
The strikethrough is conversion fuel. Listings that have trained shoppers to expect a crossed-out "was" price can see click-through and conversion soften the moment that badge disappears — and you won't get an alert when it happens. This is the flip side of the "High Price" label we covered last week: one rule punishes prices that look too high, this one punishes prices that have been "on sale" for too long.
🖊️ What to do
Pull any ASIN that's been running near-permanent promos and check how many of the last 90 days sat below your non-promo median. If it's more than half, you're a candidate.
Build a real reference price by holding a genuine non-promotional price for a meaningful stretch, then discount against it — instead of running a perpetual "sale" that Amazon will eventually treat as your baseline. For evergreen discounters, decide which is worth more to you: the lower price, or the badge that frames it as a deal.
HOT TOPIC
We flagged that Prime Day moved to June. Now the hard deadlines are public, and the first one is days away while a lot of your competitors are still planning for the old July window. That gap is your opening.
Here's the calendar that actually matters:
Trackers are reading those inventory cutoffs as a four-day event starting around June 23, though Amazon hasn't confirmed exact dates.
🎯 The bottom line
The deal-submission window closes before the inventory window does — so the work is front-loaded. If you wait until your stock lands to think about deals, you'll miss the May 26 cutoff entirely and be selling at full price during the biggest event of the quarter.
🖊️ What to do
Today: lock your Prime Day deals in Seller Central before May 26. Then back-solve your inbound plan from the May 27arrival cutoff (or June 5 if you're on optimized splits) — that means shipments need to be on their way now, not next week. And don't assume your competitors did the math: a clean, well-stocked deal submitted on time can win placement that brands stuck on a July timeline simply forfeit.
TRENDING TOPIC
A turnaround worth studying, from a thread making the rounds in r/AmazonFBA.
A beauty brand run by a genuinely sharp product person — knew his market, had supplier relationships, understood his customer. The product was right; the PPC under it was a mess. Ten months of cleanup later: $13K → $74K/mo, ~900% YoY, ~$23K/mo profit. Almost none of it was clever.
🔨 What was broken
100 keywords per campaign (Amazon only feeds 5–10 real impressions — the rest starve, a.k.a. keyword cannibalization), a single auto campaign nobody renamed or watched, "increase bids during high-traffic periods" left on everywhere quietly inflating CPC, and zero product targeting.
⚙️ The fixes
Tight single-purpose campaigns, weekly harvesting from auto, the bid toggle off, and two product-targeting campaigns — exact against competitors he beats on reviews/price, expanded against high-volume rivals for ASIN discovery.
The non-obvious win was B2B — beauty has real demand from salons, studios, and bulk buyers, and dedicated B2B campaigns pulled $300 orders at ACOS the consumer side couldn't touch.
🤖 The compounding piece
A Claude automation that pulls his Search Query Performance report monthly, flags keywords with rising purchase rate, and feeds them into listing bullets — CVR hit 19%. Worth noting how he runs it: a scheduled task on the Amazon API, but he reviews candidates in a Google Sheet before anything goes live. Let the AI find the signal; you keep the final click.
PPC is a tool. Brand building is the job. If your ad person is great at bids and clueless about SKU economics and brand, your brand is in the wrong hands.
