Can Amazon's AI find your product if a shopper never opens your listing? On Epis
By Michael Erickson Facchin · October 31, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Can Amazon's AI find your product if a shopper never opens your listing?
On Episode 407 of The PPC Den, I sat down with Scotty Peck from CrankTank (they oversee roughly 10,000 ASINs for outdoor and action-sports brands right across the street from Sun Valley Ski Resort).
Scotty told two stories that every Amazon operator should steal:
1. The 'When the Wife's Home' Basketball Test
Scotty mounted a 10-foot basketball rim in his living room on the shared wall with his bedroom. After his first regulation ball shook the bedroom mirror while his wife was sleeping, he opened Amazon's AI chat and asked for the same size ball, only lighter and quieter.
It recommended one. He bought it without ever opening the product page.
Now his team runs that exact conversational test on client products (like a rooftop tent mattress) across Amazon chat, ChatGPT, and Perplexity: starting at the category level, narrowing to lightweight features, and checking which brands the AI actually recommends.
2. The Bike Stand Wash Test (Why AI Needs Real Use Cases in Your Images)
Because everyone at CrankTank actually rides, climbs, and skis on their clients' gear, Scotty realized he used a client's bike repair stand every week to wash his bike, yet their Amazon listing had zero photos showing someone washing a bike on it.
Amazon's AI reads your image text overlays, visual scenes, A+ content, and Q&A-style bullets. If a use case is not shown in your photos or answered in your bullets, AI search will hand that shopper to a competitor.
We also got into what it really takes to triage 10,000 ASINs today when you cannot just live inside the ad console anymore:
-> Catching when you win the Buy Box in Salt Lake City but lose it in Kansas
-> Watching delivery speed (because no rider wants a 15-day delivery date when their bike is broken on Thursday)
-> Alerting on hero-ASIN stockouts before your daily ad budget spills into lower-converting products
Try asking Amazon's AI chat for your best seller's main use case today. Did it recommend you, or a competitor?
Full episode with Scotty here: https://lnkd.in/enjxeVn2