Amazon now sells conversational ads and writes them from your detail pages, Brand Store and campaign data. Sponsored prompts are live in the US, Branded Conversations arrive in January 2027. Here is how they work, how they bill and what to fix in your catalogue first.
Your Next Amazon Ad Is a Conversation Built From Your Catalogue
By Stephen Honight, Founder of Lmo7
Amazon is now selling conversations, and it writes them out of whatever your catalogue already says. Sponsored Products prompts and Sponsored Brands prompts moved to general availability in the US on 25 March 2026 (Amazon Ads launch announcement, advertising.amazon.com, 10 March 2026). Branded Conversations, the next step, launches in the US in January 2027 (Amazon Ads news post, 29 September 2026).
I think probably the most useful way to read these announcements is as a content story with an ad bill attached. Nobody uploads a headline and an image here. Amazon assembles the creative from the material you have already published. If that material is thin, the ad is thin, and you pay per click either way.
If you only take one thing from this piece, take the audit sequence further down. It is five checks your own team can run on your top products before you pay for a single prompt click.
Where the words in these ads come from
The way these ads work is straightforward once you see the components. Amazon says prompts “leverage Amazon’s first-party signals from your detail pages, Brand Store, campaign data, and more” (Amazon Ads launch announcement, 10 March 2026). That is Amazon’s wording, and I would read it literally. The sources are your detail pages, your Brand Store and your campaign data.
From January, Branded Conversations add a fourth input. Brands write a campaign-level brief, and Amazon uses it alongside the catalogue (Amazon Ads news post, 29 September 2026). So there are four sources in total, and three of them are already live.
The commercial implication is direct. The ad creative is the listing. A shopper who taps a prompt gets an answer built from your own pages, and the quality of that answer depends on whether those pages contain anything worth drawing on. Content quality now sets ad quality.
Enrolment is automatic, which is the second point to take in. Amazon states that campaigns are automatically enrolled with no setup (Amazon Ads launch announcement, 10 March 2026). If you are a US advertiser running Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands, you may already be running conversational ads that nobody on your team wrote or approved. The pause controls exist, but you have to go and look for them.
What Amazon has announced
Sponsored prompts, live now in the US
Sponsored Products prompts and Sponsored Brands prompts are AI-powered conversational ads. They appear in shopping results and on product detail pages. When a shopper clicks one, it may open a dialog in Rufus, which is Amazon’s shopping assistant and has since been folded into Alexa for Shopping, or it may answer directly on the page (Amazon Ads launch announcement, 10 March 2026).
The timeline from Amazon’s announcement is short. Prompts were introduced in November 2025 in open beta. They moved to general availability in the US on 25 March 2026. From general availability, Amazon charges for them as part of existing CPC bidding and billing (Amazon Ads launch announcement, 10 March 2026). We covered the open beta when it first appeared in our 2025 piece on prompt advertising. What has changed since is that the prompts now bill.
They are available to US advertisers using Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands, excluding authors and publishers. They are US only (Amazon Ads launch announcement, 10 March 2026).
Operators will want to know where to look. Amazon describes a Prompts tab in the Ads Console, found under Campaign, then Ad Group, then Ads, then Prompts. It lists every prompt that has received a click, with the prompt text, the associated ad, impressions, clicks and orders. A separate Prompts report adds CTR, CPC, spend, sales, ACOS, ROAS and 7-day orders and units (Amazon Ads launch announcement, 10 March 2026). You can pause individual prompts from the console.
Reading that tab is the quickest way to find out what your catalogue is currently saying on your behalf.
Branded Conversations, January 2027
Amazon describes Branded Conversations as the next evolution of Sponsored Brands prompts. They launch in January 2027 in the United States for US endemic advertisers using Sponsored Brands ads, excluding authors, and they start with collections campaigns (Amazon Ads news post and Amazon Ads launch page, both 29 September 2026, announced at unBoxed 2026).
The shopper experience changes in a specific way. When a shopper taps a prompt on a Sponsored Brands collections ad, they enter a multi-turn conversation inside Alexa for Shopping. That conversation draws on the brand’s catalogue and brand-supplied content. Amazon’s examples of that content are “product guides, compatibility info, and usage tips”, and the conversation is personalised to the shopper’s preferences and purchase history (Amazon Ads launch page, 29 September 2026).
Brands shape the conversation through a campaign-level brief. Amazon lists what the brief covers: what makes the brand different, what sets products apart, how they address customer needs and how products complement each other (Amazon Ads launch page, 29 September 2026).
Amazon’s own worked example is a skincare brand. The brand says which cleanser is best for oily skin, which for sensitive skin and which for beginners. It adds the complementary toners, serums, moisturisers and sunscreens. A shopper who types “Help me build a daily routine” then gets a brand-informed answer (Amazon Ads launch page, 29 September 2026).
On control, Amazon says eligible Sponsored Brands collections campaigns are automatically enrolled, using existing targeting and budgets. Self-serve controls include pausing individual conversations, campaign-specific inputs, reporting through the Console and API, and opt-out at campaign or account level. Amazon says API documentation will follow closer to launch. Conversations are clearly marked as Sponsored inside Alexa for Shopping (Amazon Ads launch page, 29 September 2026).
Amazon also gave an early testing figure. It says “nearly 20% of shoppers who interact with a Sponsored Brands prompt continue the conversation about that brand” (Amazon Ads news post, 29 September 2026). Treat that with the caution you would give any vendor number. It is Amazon’s own, from early testing, and Amazon gives no baseline to compare it against.
Amazon’s Muthu Muthukrishnan, Vice President of Sponsored Ads, said brands get “the ability to bring their product expertise and storytelling into those conversations, at the moment of decision” (Amazon Ads news post, 29 September 2026).
For why Alexa for Shopping matters as a place where purchases happen, see our piece on Alexa as a transaction surface. The Amazon Ads agent side is in our note on the Amazon Ads agent and media planning.
The money detail
Branded Conversations bill on the conversation-starter prompt only. Amazon charges CPC on that first prompt, and follow-up turns are free (Amazon Ads launch page, 29 September 2026).
Think through what that does to the incentive. You pay once, when the shopper taps. Everything after that is free to you. So the longer and more useful the conversation runs, the more value you get from each paid click. A shopper who asks three follow-up questions about compatibility or routine costs you the same as one who asks none.
The conversation can only be as good as the content it can draw on. If your catalogue answers the follow-up questions, the free turns work for you. If it does not, the shopper gets a vague reply from a conversation with your name on it, marked as Sponsored.
My view would be that this changes what a good Sponsored Brands campaign looks like from January. Bid strategy still matters, and alongside it sits a content question: what can Amazon’s assistant actually say about us once the shopper starts talking?
The eligibility layer
There is a second system underneath the ads, and it decides which products the assistant recalls at all. Reviews are part of the behavioural eligibility that sits behind that recall.
Amazon is moving on this too. Review Requests launch in November 2026. They invite verified buyers to leave a review from Amazon’s busiest pages, such as the homepage, in one tap. In Amazon’s early testing, products using Review Requests received around three times as many ratings and reviews each week (Amazon Ads news post, 29 September 2026). That is Amazon’s own figure and I have no independent check on it.
That points to two jobs that have to run together. One is content quick wins: rewriting the pages the conversations will draw on. The other is the longer authority and eligibility work, covering reviews and the behavioural signals that decide whether a product gets recalled in the first place. A brand with excellent copy and few reviews has done half the work. I would run both tracks at once.
What to do now
Here is the practical sequence I would follow. Most of it is a content audit with a different question attached.
Audit what the assistant can actually draw on for your hero ASINs, the handful of products that carry most of your sales. Pick those products and read each detail page as if you were the assistant answering a stranger. Look for comparison language that says how this product differs from your others. Look for works-for and does-not-work-for lines. Check whether the page answers the category questions shoppers actually ask. Check for compatibility information. Check for routine and bundle information, which is exactly what Amazon’s skincare example relies on.
Write detail page, A+ and Brand Store copy that answers real questions. A+ is the expanded brand content that sits below the bullets on a listing. If a shopper would ask a shop assistant “which one is best for beginners”, the page should say. The detail pages and Brand Store are named sources in Amazon’s own description of how prompts are assembled, so this is the place the work lands.
Prepare the campaign-level brief as if your best in-store expert wrote it. Branded Conversations will let you tell Amazon what makes your brand different, what sets products apart, how they meet customer needs and how they fit together. Draft that now. A brief written in a hurry in January will read like one.
Watch the Prompts tab and pause misfires. If you advertise in the US, go to Campaign, Ad Group, Ads, Prompts and read what has received clicks. Where a prompt makes a claim your product cannot support, or points a shopper to the wrong item, pause it. Then fix the content that produced it.
A note for UK teams. Both formats are US only today, and Amazon has announced no UK date, so I would not plan UK budget around them. The content work still transfers. The same catalogue powers Rufus and Alexa for Shopping recall everywhere, whether or not a sponsored format sits on top.
The organic proof point from Trip Drinks
Lmo7 ran a 60-day engagement with Trip Drinks and tracked LLM visibility throughout. Over that period Trip Drinks moved from 7th to 3rd average position across major LLMs, and AI referral traffic grew 33% (Lmo7 LLM visibility tracking, 60-day Trip Drinks engagement, verified against the Lmo7 case study file).
That is an organic content result. It is not an ads result, and I am not claiming any of it came from sponsored prompts or Branded Conversations, which were not part of that engagement. What it shows is that content work moves how AI systems recall and rank a brand. Sponsored conversations draw on the same material.
The ad does not replace the organic work
Someone will argue that a paid conversation lets a brand skip the slow content work. Amazon’s own description does not support that. The ads draw on detail pages, Brand Store, campaign data and a brand-supplied brief, and every one of those is content you have to write.
The offer-positive version is simpler. The same content work that earns organic recall is the work that powers the paid conversation. You do it once and it feeds both. The brands that do it before January will start Branded Conversations with a better brief and better pages, and they will spend their first clicks on a conversation that holds up.
What to do next
Everything in the sequence above is work your own team can run, and I would rather you ran it than did nothing before January. Where Lmo7 fits is pace and depth. Here is how I would route it, in priority order. Prices are Lmo7’s current rates as published at lmo7.com/pricing.
1. For most single-brand teams, start with Lmo7 Challenger. That is Amazon Content Optimisation at £750 per month plus Amazon Ads at £1,000 per month. Our Full Amazon Stack is £2,500 per month. The commercial reason is that the conversations draw on your content and attach to your campaigns, so fixing one and managing the other together stops you paying for clicks into thin answers.
2. If your team wants direct API access, take DaaS. It is £250 + VAT per month per marketplace. You can run the recall baseline yourself and watch prompt performance as it comes in. The commercial reason is that teams with in-house analysts can measure before and after without waiting on a report.
3. If you run a multi-brand portfolio, book an Enterprise workshop. These start from £5,000. The commercial reason is that several brand teams, a media agency and a content owner all touch these formats, and January is close enough that stakeholders need to agree who owns the brief before it is due.
If you would rather we ran the first audit, send over your hero ASINs and we will start there.
Stephen Honight is the founder of Lmo7, the agency helping consumer brands win in AI-powered search and agentic commerce.