Recently, Amazon announced multiple generative AI updates to help sellers optimize their advertising efforts and give customers a better shopping experience. Many Amazon sellers were left wondering what this update means for their brands, and many agencies were planning logistical updates to address this issue for their clients.
Here’s everything you need to know about Amazon’s AI content changes, and what it could mean for your brand or agency.
The Update
Earlier this year, Amazon announced some updates to their listing bullet point requirements and restricted keywords. The update was fairly boilerplate—such as the elimination of special characters, emojis, and external links. However, the update also noted that listings that fail to comply with these requirements could be automatically updated by Amazon.
Yes, you read that right. Amazon could update your content without your knowledge or consent.
Amazon’s reasoning for this update sounds good in theory. This update has the potential to streamline listings by updating content that is difficult to read, contains characters that don’t load, or is formatted incorrectly. These updates would improve the overall customer experience, which is always Amazon’s primary goal as a customer-centric brand.
And, in theory, this update could also benefit sellers by automatically fixing errors in their listings that are against Amazon’s policies—preventing these listings from being flagged or taken down.
Navigating This New Reality
The updating of listings without sellers’ knowledge or consent is not new. Many sellers who are not a Brand Registered owner have reported that competitors will submit inaccurate listing information to their listing—which often negatively impacts sales and customer experience. However, now that these changes are coming from Amazon itself, there’s an added layer of confusion to this update.
Perhaps the biggest effect this update will have on Amazon sellers is that your content could be updated without your knowledge. If you manage hundreds of listings across multiple Amazon accounts… you can do the math and easily see how overwhelming this process becomes when you’re not notified of changes.
Another reality of these AI-generated updates is that your listing information could become inaccurate. Many sellers have reported Amazon updating their listing content to describe the wrong product or include incorrect information about the product.
Most Amazon sellers spend time meticulously crafting Amazon bullet points and descriptions that will boost their organic ranking—and that hard work could be undone with an unsolicited change from Amazon.
Which leads us to our final point that a negative hit to your organic ranking could also impact your advertising efforts. The keywords you advertise on can impact your likelihood to organically rank on them. So, if you’re advertising on a keyword in order to try and rank organically for it, and Amazon takes that keyword out of your listing, it’ll be harder to achieve that. And because most sellers rely on advertising to scale and sustain their business, these updates could impact your business overall.
Next Steps
How to Monitor Amazon Content Changes
It would take hours and hours to verify all of these content and changes manually—and it would be nearly impossible if you manage more than one product across multiple Amazon accounts.
Using a tool to monitor your Amazon content is the easiest way to keep track of all these changes, but not all tools are created equal.
Kapoq’s content module alerts you when a change is made to your content, and allows you to revert your content to its original state with the click of a button. You can also revert these changes in bulk, saving you valuable time.
When you’re happy with your listing content and want to lock it in place, simply mark it as your baseline in Kapoq, and we’ll alert you to any deviations from the baseline. Whenever there’s a change to your content, you can always revert back with a single click.
But more importantly, the content module connects to the other five modules—advertising, inventory, customer experience, accounting, and analytics—so you have full visibility into how each change is affecting every other area of your Amazon business.
An Example Scenario
Let’s say you’re a brand manager at an agency, responsible for managing 5 client accounts, each with 2–3 sub-brands. You receive a Kapoq alert that the content for a handful of SKUs under one brand was changed by Amazon’s AI. You immediately alert the client to the change, but they choose to not revert the change and instead want to monitor the effects of the change.
You could then create an Event Stake within Kapoq, noting exactly when these content changes occurred. From there, you’re able to see real-time updates on how this change affected all areas of your client’s business, from organic ranking to ad revenue.
Never miss a change to your content. Book your free demo of Kapoq today.
