Amazon plans to map every product on Earth as AI shopping agents close in

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Amazon's plan to catalogue every product sold anywhere. A leaked internal document shows why the company thinks its AI shopping tools need it.

Amazon's plan to know every product

Amazon has drawn up an internal plan to compile product data on virtually every item sold anywhere, including things it does not itself stock, according to a leaked internal document

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. If it is built, the internal document says, the project could aim to keep product research on Amazon rather than lose it to Google, brand sites or review sites

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Source: Analytics Insight

Source: Analytics Insight

The plan is laid out in a six-page product proposal memo, Amazon's standard format for floating new ideas, with an aspirational release date of October 1, 2027. Not every such memo becomes a product, and this one could be modified or scrapped

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. Amazon called it a draft brainstorm that may not reflect current plans, and said its figures are outdated. "Draft, outdated documents often paint an incomplete picture and the existence of a brainstorming document such as this one doesn't necessarily reflect our current plans," the company said

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Why Amazon thinks it needs this

The document's own argument is that Amazon cannot be shoppers' first stop for every purchase if they have to leave the site to research products on Google, brand websites and review sites

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. "Customers have always been able to find products on Amazon. What's been missing is understanding - how do these products relate to each other, which one is right for me, and what else should I consider?" Robert Tekiela, the vice president whose unit would run the project, wrote in it

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Source: Reuters

Source: Reuters

The numbers back the worry up. The document cites a 2025 Morgan Stanley analysis: only 16% of online shoppers start product research on Amazon, against Google's 57%

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The project would also fix problems closer to home. Amazon's AI shopping assistant, Rufus until it was renamed Alexa for Shopping in May, handles about 83 million searches a week. The document says the quality falls short: "Many Rufus answers are factually wrong or incomplete, but customers lack expertise to detect these errors"

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. The document says better data would let Amazon run cheaper models on those queries

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. Amazon disputes the document's numbers, putting Alexa for Shopping's global accuracy at roughly 97% by its own count

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Mechanically, the plan would combine data feeds contributed by brands with Amazon independently crawling other retailers' websites. Coca-Cola and Bayer have signed on to contribute data, per the document, and Amazon held a summit with Procter & Gamble's chief executive about a trial

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. Employees describe the whole thing as an expansion of existing services, Buy for Me and Shop Direct, which already list other retailers' products with Amazon as the purchasing middleman

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The agent fight

The other motive, per people familiar with the matter, is countering third-party AI shopping agents before they siphon shoppers away. Amazon has already acted on that fear. It blocked Meta's Muse agent from its retail site in September, and last year it sued Perplexity to block similar access, a case still ongoing

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. Muse has passed 10 million users across the US and Canada since its September launch

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. A JPMorgan research note sees "the potential to become the most widely used consumer AI application since ChatGPT"

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. Grok was blocked too, which prompted Elon Musk to post on X: "Maybe we should start a competitor to Amazon"

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Source: PYMNTS

Source: PYMNTS

Chief executive Andy Jassy has said otherwise in public. "Few customers are doing much shopping this way yet," he told analysts on the third-quarter earnings call, adding that the ad business had been minimally affected

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. That public line sits awkwardly against what people familiar with the matter told Reuters: executives are privately wary of agents, and the plan is aimed partly at countering them

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Reuters could not determine whether the project will be built at all, how the crawling would work, or whether Amazon would need anyone's permission to do it

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. Analytics Insight raises a further concern: a company that sells its own products and earns ad money may struggle to convince anyone its suggestions are unbiased

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