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By Bradley Sutton · September 14, 2025 · Curated by George's Blog
You’ve been lied to about the importance of Rufus in Amazon search.
No, I don’t really think anyone is purposely misleading or saying untrue statements about Rufus.
However if you look at the actions of some Amazon sellers with how much importance they are putting on Rufus, one might come to the conclusion that they must have been lied to, otherwise why are they putting so much emphasis on it and doing less of traditional keyword research?
A few weeks ago I recorded Episode 699 of the Serious Sellers Podcast and did a study on how Rufus has changed buyer behavior.
First of all, don’t get me wrong. I have been saying for a year that sellers need to (and I do it too) optimize their listings for Rufus. What has bothered me though is how so many are doing it in place of traditional keyword research.
My theory I wanted to prove/disprove was threefold.
1. There is not some massive shift of people switching from using Amazon search bar to using Rufus for product discovery
2. There is not a massive shift of customers, in search results, filtering them using Rufus.
3. The most common place people use Rufus is after getting to a product page.
To study this, I had our data science team study 10’s of thousands of keywords that had uninterrupted data for the last 2 years, going back to before Rufus was implemented.
To skip ahead to the results go ahead and check out the full episode 699 but over the next few days I’ll have clips from it on here for each of those hypotheses.