Amazon is changing the experience for online shoppers in a major way with the introduction of Rufus, Amazon AI-powered discovery, and other tech advancements. Prime Day 2025 will be a proving ground for some of these new shopping tools and for vendors testing their Amazon AI strategy.
What are these tools and what do brands and advertisers need to know about them? How will they impact our marketing during Prime Day 2025? From Amazon’s AI-generated audio summaries (for shoppers who want to listen rather than read), to AI personalized shopping assistants, we will cover:
- Rufus, Amazon AI-powered discovery, and the strategic implications for brands
- How to leverage AI in Amazon advertising automation tools
How is Amazon AI changing shoppers’ experience
From Amazon Search to AI-powered Discovery
Why is everyone talking about “discovery”? What happened to “search”?
Amazon search is exploring an enhancement from traditional keyword-based queries to a more AI-powered discovery engine. It mimics how people naturally browse, explore, and consider options rather than focusing on exact words or phrases. Here’s how it’s changing from “search” to “discovery”:
- Natural Language Queries
This Prime Day, Amazon shoppers will be able to type (or speak) full questions or descriptive phrases (e.g. “What are the best noise-cancelling headphones for travel under $300?”). By using generative AI to understand intent, Amazon can offer more nuanced and relevant results to shoppers.
- Rufus, Amazon’s AI shopping buddy
Rufus is the new Amazon AI shopping assistant (available in the US and on the Amazon UK shopping app) Although Rufus was launched last year, Prime Day 2025 will be Rufus’ maiden Prime Day voyage. Its main capability is in answering product-related questions that shoppers ask using natural language and conversational phrasing. Rufus offers comparisons, use-case suggestions, and “what to look for” advice while you shop.
- Interests-based browsing with Amazon AI tools
Shoppers can set “Interests” (e.g. “home workouts” or “Japanese cooking”) and receive curated results aligned with those themes. This is a new means of discovery that’s driven by shoppers’ lifestyles or intent, not just product type or categorization.
- Amazon AI tools and user reviews
We’ve already mentioned that Amazon users who prefer to listen rather than scroll will be able to hear Amazon customer reviews. Amazon also uses AI to summarize customer reviews into bite-sized highlights. Shoppers will be able to discover which products meet consumer approval at a glance.
How will Amazon AI impact brand visibility?
Blending personalization, recommendation, content enrichment, and natural language processing, Amazon AI will be guiding shoppers through a more curated shopping journey in Prime Day 2025. Personified as Rufus, it’s more like a helpful assistant than a catalogue. For brands, this means optimizing PDP for intent, storytelling and engagement, not just keywords.
What is Rufus AI and what are the implications for brands?
With Rufus, Amazon introduces a major shift in how it surfaces and recommends products. Its main purpose is to improve relevancy, making it easier for Amazon customers to find the best product for their needs. Rufus is embedded directly in Amazon’s shopping app and website, and it acts like a chatbot or voice assistant. Shoppers can ask questions based on use-cases:
“What are the best shoes for trail running?”
“What should I look for in a baby monitor for newborns?”
“What’s a good laptop for video editing under $1,500?”
Rufus pulls answers from product listings, reviews, A+ content, customer Q&A, and brand storefronts. It summarizes and recommends products based on context and intent, not just keywords.
What Amazon’s Rufus AI means for brands when it comes to search and discovery
While a solid keyword strategy remains important for search bar shoppers, the dominance of exact-match keywords is diminishing with the rise of Rufus. Rufus interprets broader shopper intent and surfaces listings based on overall content relevance, not just keyword frequency.
This shift makes high-quality content more critical than ever. Listings that include comprehensive product details, robust FAQs, and authentic, in-depth reviews are more likely to perform well within Rufus-driven results.
Although the specific ranking factors used by Rufus AI remain unclear, maintaining digital shelf compliance and following Amazon’s listing best practices will help protect your visibility. These fundamentals still feed into Amazon’s core algorithm—on which Rufus relies to determine relevance and ranking.
How does Rufus affect my Amazon advertising optimization?
Currently, Rufus is not an ad-supported channel, nor can you buy placements within its interface. However, its growing influence on product discovery means your advertising strategy must adapt. The focus now shifts to optimizing PDPs for semantic search, ensuring your listings resonate with how real people ask questions and express intent.
If a Sponsored Product or Sponsored Brand ad leads to a poorly structured or thin listing, Rufus is less likely to surface it in organic responses. To bridge this gap, align your copy with semantic prompts shoppers are likely to use—phrases like “best laptop for college students” or “gentle baby shampoo without fragrance” reflect how Rufus interprets need-based queries.
While Rufus doesn’t currently display ads, Amazon’s trajectory—such as the move toward paid voice ads via Alexa+—suggests ad-supported AI discovery could emerge. Rufus is already designed to guide purchase decisions through conversational, intent-based experiences.
In this new paradigm, relevance to semantic search queries becomes just as important as your bidding strategy. Sponsored listings that fail to align with user intent may struggle to gain visibility. To stay competitive, focus on PDPs that anticipate and answer natural-language queries, effectively merging content strategy with ad performance.
How to build a winning Amazon AI strategy for Prime Day 2025
Brands who can embrace AI ahead of Amazon Prime Day 2025 have a lot to gain. As we know, AI isn’t a single feature; it’s the foundation that supports new ways of working smarter, faster, more profitably, and with more precision. It sits across your whole tech stack—all the tools you use to manage your ecommerce sales and marketing. These might include intelligent targeting in Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC); automated keyword tools; AI-powered content creation; and automated campaign management.
Let’s look at some of the new AI opportunities that you can tap into for Prime Day 2025. These tools can boost the effectiveness of your PDPs and help with Amazon advertising optimization.
How brands can optimize for Rufus, Amazon AI-powered discovery
Optimizing for Rufus means thinking about product visibility (or search) in a whole new way. You will need to think like Rufus. Amazon listings that will win should include:
1. Strong, clear and relevant PDP content that Rufus can easily find
- Write clear, descriptive titles and bullet points. Expand on keywords by adding use-cases (e.g. “camping table for kids”)
- Focus on benefits, not just features (e.g. portable, light-weight, easily to store)
- Add sizing, compatibility, target user, and usage context
Example:
Instead of “Insulated Stainless Steel Flask”, could use: “Leakproof, BPA-free insulated flask – ideal for hiking, commuting, or school use”.
2. Enhanced A+ and Brand Story sections to help Rufus answer customer questions
Rufus may pull from these sections to answer queries like “Which air fryer is easiest to clean?” or “Which baby bottles reduce colic?” Make sure to:
- Use lifestyle imagery and comparison charts
- Add FAQs, setup guides, and use-case scenarios in your A+ content
3. Good quality user-generated content and Q&A that will guide Rufus to your product
Rufus taps into both reviews and Q&A to provide its guidance, so you will need to:
- Encourage honest, detailed reviews and monitor what your customers say*
- Monitor customer questions and proactively answer them, helping to control the narrative
*For those who don’t know, Pacvue Commerce automates ratings and reviews monitoring and it uses Natural Language Processing to extract sentiment as well as common themes and keywords.
The Amazon AI tools that save time managing your listings
You can use other Amazon AI tools to keep your listings up to date, for example:
- Amazon’s “Enhance My Listings” tool in Amazon Seller Central improves content automatically using AI best practices.
- Amazon’s new Video Creator, currently available in Sponsored Brands campaigns, adds AI-generated product videos that increase visibility.
Having understood how Amazon is using AI to serve shoppers better, and how to optimize your listings for “organic” success, let’s turn to the AI-powered Amazon tools available for advertisers.
Creating your Prime Day campaigns using Amazon AI with Pacvue
The Pacvue advertising console supports campaigns across Amazon Sponsored Ads and Amazon Demand-side Platform (DSP). It uses AI extensively to help advertisers operate efficiently, more profitably and at scale. When it comes to the setup phase of your campaign, Pacvue’s integration with Amazon tools and our own proprietary AI capabilities are here to help:
- Campaign templates with predictive suggestions based on ad type and performance history will save you time and reduce risk
- AI-powered keyword recommendations will do the heavy-lifting when you’re deciding how to spend your budget
- Budget forecasting tools that simulate the impact of your campaign before you launch
- An integration with Amazon Marketing Cloud allows you to tap into one of the largest customer data sets in retail media, without the need for extensive technical queries. It allows you to discover, create and target Amazon shoppers using path-to-purchase data and other behavioral signals in minutes.
Optimizing your Prime Day ads using AI and automation
When your campaign is live, it’s time to monitor and optimize your investment. AI and automation in Pacvue, integrated with Amazon tools and data, makes it easy to ensure even large and complex campaigns are optimized with minimal manual intervention.
Pacvue’s advertising console introduces AI for time-saving and profitability in various ways:
- Blending data from multiple sources (like Amazon Vendor Central, digital shelf monitoring tools, and Amazon Marketing Cloud) to gather signals that trigger automatic responses. For example; when your product is winning Share of Voice, why spend money on advertising? Similarly, why advertise a product that is out of stock? Pacvue automatically prevents or pauses ad spend based on the rules that you define.
- Automating dayparting— an advertising strategy where you schedule your ads to appear at specific times of the day when shoppers are most likely to engage.
- Reallocating funds or pacing budgets based on ad performance, inventory, changing priorities, or other factors.
You can find out more about how to use rules-based automation and dayparting during Amazon tentpole events here.
Your Amazon ads, be they Amazon Sponsored Ads or Amazon DSP, will be optimized in real time, without human intervention, even when you sleep.
Measuring your Prime Day success using AI-driven insights in real time
Whether you’re using measurement data to plan your Amazon advertising strategy, to optimize your live campaigns, or to report on performance after the event, retail media performance measurement is hot topic that also poses a number of technical problems for advertising and marketing managers. Pacvue uses AI to make the measurement process easier and more insightful with:
- Predictive analytics dashboards that flag underperformance or wasted spend
- AI-driven Share of Voice tracking, showing trends vs. competitors and suggesting action
- Incrementality modelling (iROAS) via integrations with AMC and other data sources
How Pacvue Copilot helps you create retail media campaigns with confidence, at speed
Pacvue’s Copilot operates as an intelligent layer across the Pacvue suite, embedded into the Pacvue console. It allows you to query your data in Pacvue using natural language, and it answers your questions whether they’re to do with performance, operations, or best practices. For example;
- “Show me the top 10 campaign performances from last month sorted by retailer”
- “Evaluate which campaigns to invest more in and which to scale back based on performance data.”
How Pacvue can Help Tackle Rufus and Amazon AI tools During Prime Day 2025
Prime Day 2025 will be a major test for brands looking to reap rewards from one of the world’s most prominent shopping events. By leaning into AI tools across search, content, and campaign automation, you can create more relevant shopper experiences, reduce wasted spend, and respond faster to what’s working. The brands that prepare now will be the ones that perform best when it matters most.
Check out our Prime Day resources hub for more Prime Day best practices. For support setting up or implementing your Amazon AI strategy, just get in touch, we’re here to help.
