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By J.P. McShane · September 22, 2025 · Curated by George's Blog
Amazon’s SUPERB Ranking System: Cracking “Best” Searches
If you’re advertising with Amazon PPC, these high search volume keywords should look familiar:
• best-selling swimsuits
• world’s best cat litter
• most comfortable office chair
• earrings for women trendy
• best boho chic décor
Amazon has a name for these: “implicit superlative queries,” and they’re tricky for both retailers and advertisers because they’re vague and subjective. But with large language models (LLMs) and Rufus, Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, Amazon developed the SUPERB ranking system to unpack these queries to get the right product in front of the customer.
When an implicit superlative query is executed, SUPERB labels products it's considering as
• OVERALL BEST
• ALMOST BEST
• RELEVANT or
• NOT RELEVANT
To be labeled OVERALL BEST (and recommended in Rufus), your product needs to win on:
• excellence in quality
• user experience
• value for money
• innovation
• aesthetics
• environmental impact
• market position
• safety
• versatility
• processing speed
• user rating
While product descriptions and bullet points matter, Amazon recognizes these can be misleading...
“In e-commerce settings, sellers sometimes exaggerate claims in product descriptions. Making the LLM generate and reason on key useful product attributes prevents the model from providing a biased category judgment based on the seller’s description, but instead generate a well-rounded, unbiased categorization in line with the LLM’s common sense knowledge.”
Example: take the implicit superlative query “best fragrance-free baby wipes for sensitive skin.” Based on the criteria above, the LLM will look at product attributes to construct natural language descriptions like
• 99%+ water-based; alcohol/fragrance/dye-free; hypoallergenic
• dermatologist-tested; pH-balanced; suitable for newborns
• soft, durable cloth with gentle texture for effective cleanup
• minimal ingredient list (no parabens, phthalates, phenoxyethanol)
• flip-top or one-hand pop-up lid to prevent drying out
• resealable travel packs and bulk refill options
• compostable or plant-based fibers; recyclable packaging where possible
• clear per-wipe cost; large count per pack for value
Try this: to see how your products fare in SUPERB, take one product and provide only catalog attributes from your flat file—remove seller-generated bullets, descriptions, and SEO titles. Feed that into your preferred AI model and see if it can generate responses that would land you OVERALL BEST.
You can learn more about the SUPERB system here: https://lnkd.in/eQHnNpu7