🚨 New Update: Sponsored Ads as part of the Rufus chat!

If you were skeptical about this AI adoption, this update will confirm that it came to stay.

Sponsored ads will appear in Rufus-related placements (only in the US). The little shopping assistant is helping customers discover even more products, including your ads!

💡 Here’s the update:
As Rufus interacts with customers and answers their questions, your ads may appear alongside relevant suggestions.

Plus, Rufus can generate accompanying text based on the context of the conversation.

• Campaign Reports: Rufus-related placements won’t appear in your campaign metrics… yet.

My take on this one?

After spending a lot of time researching and playing around with Rufus, I noticed it heavily prioritizes brand names instead of smaller but more successful brands on Amazon.

With ad placements now being integrated into Rufus, there may be an opportunity to level the playing field (at a cost, as always).

However, if the system learns that your products are more relevant than the big brand names, it might start prioritizing them in organic search.

This is very dangerous, though, because ad placement could lead to biased recommendations driven by paid advertising, which might undermine the promise of democratized search powered by hyper-personalization and semantic SEO.

I'm not sure Rufus is going this route if ads are to be served through it.

But as Rufus continues to reshape how customers search and shop, sellers can get their products in front of the right audience at the right time.

I am excited to see what is coming, but one thing is for sure: if you are not selling to AI, you are falling behind.