Amazon's AI Chatbot Rufus Begins Displaying Ads Alongside Shopping Advice

Amazon's AI personal shopper is sharing ads with its advice

Inevitable addition to Rufus extends sponsored results into your conversation Amazon proclaimed its shopping AI chatbot Rufus as a solution for people overwhelmed by the dizzying array of products on its website. But, since it's Amazon, that's now going to include some ads, as Adweek first noted. Rufus (named for a pet corgi owned by early Amazon employees) uses AI to research products and recommend purchases through conversations. "To help customers discover more products in Amazon's generative AI-powered shopping assistant, referred to as Rufus, your ads may appear in Rufus-related placements," the update to advertisers explains. "Rufus may generate accompanying text based on the context of the conversation." Rufus generates results based on Amazon's vast product catalog, customer reviews, and community Q&As. In some ways, the advertising is just another category of information. The update brings it closer to how the standard Amazon shopping search works. Instead of 'sponsored' suggestions for products as links on the page, Rufus will directly highlight advertised products as it answers your questions. Obviously, Amazon doesn't want to spam Rufus users with unrelated ads, hence the reference to "context." So, when you ask Rufus to compare different products or ask for gift ideas, you won't get nonsensical suggestions. It's just that anything an advertiser has paid to sponsor will likely join the comparison or be included early in the collection of gift ideas. Rufus is still technically an experiment, and Amazon has warned that its responses might be inaccurate. What that might mean for sponsored products is unclear, but presumably, Amazon doesn't want hallucinations to mar the ads it serves for its clients. Rufus isn't the first to start mixing ads with its AI. Microsoft began testing advertising through its Copilot AI chatbot a year ago. And AI conversational search engine Perplexity has begun including sponsored suggestions for its search results in a way that more closely resembles Google's business model. But Amazon is the king of e-commerce, and other platforms will likely be watching closely. If Rufus ends up being a real boon for companies advertising on Amazon, you can bet imitators will rapidly roll out elsewhere if they haven't already. The ads may just be a revenue driver for Amazon, but Rufus might be fetching the next iteration of online advertising.

Amazon's AI chatbot will start serving ads to users

Product ads will start popping up in Amazon's AI chatbot Rufus. Credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images You can't escape advertising on the internet...even AI chatbots are starting to send ads your way. In an update provided to its advertisers, ecommerce giant Amazon has shared that it will start serving ads via its AI-powered shopping assistant chatbot called Rufus. "To help customers discover more products in Amazon's generative AI-powered shopping assistant, referred to as Rufus, your ads may appear in Rufus-related placements," reads Amazon's September update to its Amazon Ads platform. "Rufus may generate accompanying text based on the context of the conversation." The Amazon update was first noticed by AdWeek. According to Amazon, Rufus will serve ads based on the information users provide. Ads will be tailored to what the user is looking for based on their search terms, and the conversation they're having with the chatbot. Rufus was first launched earlier this year and rolled out across Amazon to all users in July. The AI chatbot helps provide more information on products, recommendations, and comparisons in a conversational format. Rufus uses the information available on Amazon's product pages for its knowledge base. As TechCrunch points out, this is not the first time an AI chatbot has been used to serve advertising. Last year, Microsoft started testing out ads in its own AI chatbot Copilot.

Amazon starts testing ads in its Rufus chatbot

Rufus, Amazon's recently launched, shopping-focused chatbot, is getting ads soon. That's according to a changelog published by Amazon this week (first spotted by AdWeek), which states that sponsored ads could soon start appearing in placements for Rufus users in the U.S. Ads will be shown based on Amazon search and conversational context, Amazon says, and Rufus may generate text to accompany existing ad copy in certain cases. "We continue to make enhancements to the Rufus experience, including improving brand and product discovery by introducing relevant sponsored ads that help customers discover selections related to their conversation with Rufus," the spokesperson said. The ads in Rufus test recalls Microsoft's experiments inserting ads into Copilot, the chatbot in Bing and the company's other properties, including Windows. AI being the costly endeavor that it is, it's not exactly surprising that companies are looking for tried-and-true methods to generate a return on investment -- or at least break even.