Amazon SEO

TL;DR — Amazon SEOAmazon SEO is optimizing product listings to rank in Amazon's own search results — its internal search algorithm (historically nicknamed A9, after the Amazon search subsidiary) weighs relevance to the query against performance signals like conversion rate, sales velocity, price, and reviews. It's a separate ranking system from Google, because Amazon is optimizing for revenue per search, not just relevance. is getting your products to rank in Amazon’s own search box — not in Google. Amazon’s search cares about two things: does your listing match what the shopper typed (your title, bullets, and hidden search terms), and does it sell when people see it (conversion, sales, price, reviews). So optimizing a listing is part keyword work and part making the product actually attractive to buy.

Amazon has its own search engine

When you sell on Amazon, your product competes in Amazon’s search results — a completely different system from Google. Type a query into Amazon and it ranks listings using its own algorithm, one that has always been tuned for one thing: selling stuff.

That’s the big mental shift. Google mostly ranks pages on how relevant and trustworthy they are. Amazon is a store, so its search is trying to show you the product you’re most likely to buy. That means alongside keyword relevance, it leans hard on things Google doesn’t care about at all: how often a listing converts into a sale, how fast it’s selling, the price, and the reviews.

What actually moves a listing up

Amazon’s own seller guide is refreshingly plain about this. It says Amazon SEO is “a number of strategies you can use to improve product and brand visibility in Amazon search results,” and it lays out concrete steps. The short version:

• Get the keywords right. Find the words shoppers actually type, and put the important ones in your title, bullet points, and description. Amazon’s advice: “Include only the most important keywords” — don’t cram.
• Fill in the backend search terms. These are hidden keyword fields on your listing that shoppers never see but the algorithm reads. Use them for synonyms and spellings you couldn’t fit naturally into the visible copy.
• Use great images. Amazon wants a “plain white background” main image with the product filling most of the frame. Better photos sell better, and selling better lifts your rank.
• Price competitively. Price is both a shopper decision and a ranking input.
• Earn reviews honestly. More (and better) reviews raise conversion, which feeds back into rank.

The thing most people get wrong

There’s no secret hack. The listings that rank are the ones that match the search and convert well once shown. Keyword-stuffing your title with every term you can think of backfires — Amazon says the title should “still make sense and be easy to read.” And the “exact ranking-factor percentages” you’ll see quoted around the web (things like “35% is this, 20% is that”) aren’t published by Amazon; treat them as made-up.

Want the full model — the A9 history, how conversion and sales velocity feed rank, backend keyword mechanics, and the myths worth debunking? Switch to the Advanced tab.

TL;DR — Amazon SEOAmazon SEO is optimizing product listings to rank in Amazon's own search results — its internal search algorithm (historically nicknamed A9, after the Amazon search subsidiary) weighs relevance to the query against performance signals like conversion rate, sales velocity, price, and reviews. It's a separate ranking system from Google, because Amazon is optimizing for revenue per search, not just relevance. is ranking inside Amazon’s own search, a system nicknamed A9 after the Amazon search subsidiary founded in 2003. It scores a listing on two axes — relevance (does the title/bullets/backend match the query) and performance (conversion rate, sales velocity, price, reviews) — because the marketplace optimizes for revenue per search, not web relevance. Amazon’s own seller docs are the only reliable source for the levers; the “exact factor percentages” circulating on vendor blogs are unsourced folklore, and “A10” is community shorthand, not an official name. This is a separate algorithm from Google web search and from eBay, Etsy, and Walmart’s systems.

A9 is not a knockoff Google

Amazon’s search algorithm is commonly called A9 — the name comes from A9.com, which Wikipedia describes as “a subsidiary of Amazon that developed search engine and search advertising technology,” founded in 2003. That subsidiary built the engine that, in Wikipedia’s words, “powered product search for Amazon.com and several other eCommerce retailers.” The consumer-facing a9.com site is long gone — in 2019 Amazon pointed the domain to its homepage — but the search team and the nickname stuck.

Two things follow from A9 being Amazon’s engine, not Google’s:

1. The objective function is different. Google ranks for relevance and authority; a page that answers the query well wins. Amazon ranks for predicted revenue per search — the product most likely to sell when shown. That’s why conversion rate and sales velocity are first-class ranking inputs on Amazon and essentially don’t exist as concepts in web search.
2. “A10” is not a real algorithm name. You’ll see the SEO/seller community talk about “A10” as a supposed successor that weighs external traffic, organic sales, and seller authority more heavily. Amazon has never named or announced an “A10.” It’s shorthand for the observation that the system has evolved — useful as a label, not as a citable fact. More recently Amazon has layered on AI systems (its COSMO semantic model and the Rufus shopping assistant) that read intent behind a query, not just literal keyword matches — but again, treat vendor descriptions of their internals as informed inference, not Amazon’s own spec.

The two axes: relevance and performance

Every Amazon listing is effectively scored on two questions.

Does it match the query? This is the keyword-relevance side, and it’s the part you control directly through the structured fields Amazon parses:

• Title — the highest-weight text field. Amazon’s guidance: “Include only the most important keywords to capture the attention of your intended customer,” and the title should “still make sense and be easy to read.”
• Bullet points and description — Amazon frames keyword work as “writing naturally” and providing “the information your audience is seeking,” not stuffing.
• Backend search terms — hidden keyword fields the shopper never sees but the algorithm indexes. This is where synonyms, alternate spellings, and terms that wouldn’t read well in visible copy belong. (The widely repeated “249 bytes” limit is standard seller guidance, but Amazon’s public SEO blog doesn’t state a byte figure — confirm the current limit in Seller Central rather than trusting a round number from a blog.)
• Category and structured attributes — putting the product in the right node and filling brand/attribute fields helps Amazon match it to the right searches.

Does it convert once shown? This is the performance side, and it’s where Amazon diverges sharply from Google. A listing that gets clicks but few sales is telling Amazon it’s the wrong result for that query. The inputs here:

• Conversion rate — the share of shoppers who buy after landing on the listing.
• Sales velocity — how fast the product is selling relative to competitors.
• Price — Amazon explicitly treats price as a lever, advising sellers to research competitors and “consider your costs (including shipping costs).”
• Reviews and ratings — they drive conversion, so they feed rank indirectly.
• Images — Amazon wants a “plain white background” main image with the product filling “85% or more of the frame,” because better images convert.

The structured fields get you eligible to rank for a query; the performance signals decide how high. Optimize the fields first, then work the conversion levers, because those feed back into rank.

Whose interest is the algorithm serving?

A useful caveat for anyone treating Amazon’s ranking as a neutral relevance machine: in 2019 The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon had adjusted its search to more prominently feature products that were more profitable for Amazon, as covered by CNBC. Amazon disputed it — a spokeswoman said “The Wall Street Journal has it wrong” and that the company hadn’t changed its ranking criteria to include profitability. Wikipedia records that “Amazon took down the A9.com site and pointed the domain name to Amazon’s home page” around the same period. Whatever the internal truth, the takeaway for sellers is that marketplace search is optimizing for the marketplace’s business — which is exactly why chasing conversion and velocity, not just keywords, is the winning posture.

Where the listing pages meet the wider web

Public Amazon listing URLs also get crawled and indexedStoring a crawled page in the search index so it can appear in results. Crawled is not the same as indexed — Google selects what to keep, and indexing isn't guaranteed. by Google like any other page, so there’s a thin overlap with ordinary technical SEOTechnical SEO is the practice of making a site easy for search engines to crawl, render, index, and (now) be eligible for AI answers. It's the foundation that lets your content and links rank — not a ranking trick of its own. — unique, descriptive titles help both systems, and templated boilerplate risks the same thin-content and duplication problems you’d worry about anywhere. But don’t confuse the two: ranking an Amazon listing in Amazon search is the A9 game, and it’s separate from ranking your own store in Google. One quirk worth flagging, since it comes up constantly: self-serving reviews on a page you control don’t earn Google’s review-snippet stars the way they used to — Google tightened its review rich-results policy in 2019 so that, in most cases, only third-party review sites qualify. That’s a Google-SERP concern, not an Amazon-ranking one, but it’s the kind of thing that gets muddled when people lump “Amazon SEO” together with web SEO.

The myths worth ignoring

• “There’s a secret trick to rank #1.” There isn’t. The listings that win match the query and convert. Everything else is derivative of those two facts.
• “These are the exact ranking-factor weights.” The precise percentages that recur across vendor blogs (relevance is X%, seller performance is Y%) have no attributable Amazon source. They read like one unverified estimate copied site-to-site until it looks authoritative. Don’t build a strategy on false precision.
• “A10 is Amazon’s official new algorithm.” It’s community terminology for an evolving system, not a named Amazon release.
• “Stuff the title with every keyword.” Amazon’s own guidance says the title should stay readable and include only the most important keywords; the backend search-term fields exist precisely so you don’t have to jam everything into visible copy.

Where this sits among the marketplaces

Amazon is one algorithm among several. eBay ranks with Cassini under its “Best Match” sort, Etsy blends relevance with a listing-quality score, and Walmart weighs relevance, listing quality, and price. The shared principle across all of them is the one Google doesn’t share: conversion and sales performance rank you, not just keywords. Pick the marketplace you actually sell on and go deep on its documented factors — a generic cross-marketplace checklist underperforms because the specifics differ. For the shared model and the other platforms, see the Marketplace SEO hub.

AI summary

A condensed take on the Advanced version:

• Amazon SEOAmazon SEO is optimizing product listings to rank in Amazon's own search results — its internal search algorithm (historically nicknamed A9, after the Amazon search subsidiary) weighs relevance to the query against performance signals like conversion rate, sales velocity, price, and reviews. It's a separate ranking system from Google, because Amazon is optimizing for revenue per search, not just relevance. = ranking in Amazon’s own search, a separate system from Google, nicknamed A9 after A9.com, the Amazon search subsidiary founded in 2003.
• Two ranking axes: relevance + performance. Relevance = title, bullets, description, backend search terms, category/attributes. Performance = conversion rate, sales velocity, price, reviews, images. Amazon optimizes for revenue per search, so performance signals matter in a way they don’t in web search.
• Amazon’s own seller docs are the reliable source. They list concrete tactics (keyword research, titles, bullets, backend terms, images, price) and explicitly warn against keyword stuffing — the title should “still make sense and be easy to read.”
• “A10” is community shorthand, not an official Amazon name. Amazon has also layered AI (COSMO for intent, Rufus for conversational shopping) onto search; vendor descriptions of these are inference, not Amazon’s spec.
• Ignore the fake “exact ranking-factor percentages” — they have no Amazon source and are copied across vendor blogs.
• In 2019 the WSJ reported Amazon tuned search toward more profitable products; Amazon disputed it (“The Wall Street Journal has it wrong”). Either way, marketplace search serves the marketplace’s business.
• Distinct from Google web SEO (and from eBay/Etsy/Walmart algorithms), though public Amazon listing URLs still get crawled by Google like any page.

Official documentation

Primary-source guidance from Amazon. Note that Amazon does not publish a full ranking-factor spec — its seller-facing guides are the closest thing to official.

Amazon (Sell on Amazon / Seller Central)

• Amazon SEO: 7 ways to improve your product’s search rankings — Amazon’s own definition of Amazon SEOAmazon SEO is optimizing product listings to rank in Amazon's own search results — its internal search algorithm (historically nicknamed A9, after the Amazon search subsidiary) weighs relevance to the query against performance signals like conversion rate, sales velocity, price, and reviews. It's a separate ranking system from Google, because Amazon is optimizing for revenue per search, not just relevance. and its seven documented tactics (keyword research, titles, descriptions, bullets, backend search terms, images, price).
• Improve product visibility through effective Amazon keyword research — Amazon’s guidance on finding shopper search terms and using backend keywords without stuffing.
• How to boost Amazon listings to drive more sales — listing-quality and merchandising tactics that feed conversion.
• Search optimization (Seller Central Help) — the in-console reference for optimizing listings for search.

Background / context

• A9.com (Wikipedia) — the history of the Amazon search subsidiary the “A9” nickname comes from: founded 2003, developed Amazon’s search technology, domain pointed to Amazon’s homepage in 2019.

Quotes from the source

On-the-record wording from Amazon’s own documentation and from the reporting record. Everything below is an exact substring of its source; anything I couldn’t verify verbatim is paraphrased elsewhere without quote marks.

Amazon — what Amazon SEOAmazon SEO is optimizing product listings to rank in Amazon's own search results — its internal search algorithm (historically nicknamed A9, after the Amazon search subsidiary) weighs relevance to the query against performance signals like conversion rate, sales velocity, price, and reviews. It's a separate ranking system from Google, because Amazon is optimizing for revenue per search, not just relevance. is and how to do it

• “Amazon search engine optimization (SEO) refers to a number of strategies you can use to improve product and brand visibility in Amazon search results.” — Sell on Amazon. Read the guide
• “Include only the most important keywords to capture the attention of your intended customer.” (on titles) Read the guide
• “The title should still make sense and be easy to read.” (against keyword stuffing) Read the guide

Amazon — on the A9 team, via the reporting record

• Amazon’s response to the 2019 WSJ story, per its spokeswoman: “The Wall Street Journal has it wrong.” CNBC coverage

Wikipedia — the A9 subsidiary

• “A9.com was a subsidiary of Amazon that developed search engine and search advertising technology.” A9.com
• “In 2019, after reporting from The Wall Street Journal revealed that Amazon had changed its search algorithm to favor more profitable products, Amazon took down the A9.com site and pointed the domain name to Amazon’s home page.” A9.com

Amazon listing optimization checklist

Work the structured fields first (they make you eligible to rank), then the conversion levers (they decide how high):

Relevance — the fields Amazon parses

• Primary keyword and the most important modifiers are in the title, kept readable (not stuffed).
• Bullet points cover benefits and specs in natural language, working in secondary keywords.
• Description (or A+ content, if you’re brand-registered) adds detail: materials, sizes, dimensions, care, warranty.
• Backend search terms filled with synonyms, alternate spellings, and terms that didn’t fit the visible copy — no duplicates of front-end words (verify the current character/byte limit in Seller Central).
• Product is in the correct category node with brand and attribute fields completed.

Performance — the conversion levers that feed rank

• Main image on a plain white background, product filling most of the frame; multiple angles / lifestyle shots added.
• Price researched against competitors, with your costs and margins checked.
• Reviews actively (and compliantly) encouraged; questions answered.
• Listing is in stock and fulfillment is reliable (stockouts hurt velocity and rank).

Sanity checks

• You’re not relying on any “exact ranking-factor percentage” as fact.
• You’re not treating “A10” as an official, documented algorithm.
• You’re separating Amazon-search optimization from Google web SEO for your own store — they’re different systems.

The mental models

1. Two axes: match × convert. Every listing is scored on does it match the query (relevance) and does it sell once shown (performance). Relevance gets you into the running; performance decides your position. When a listing underperforms, figure out which axis is failing before you touch anything — a listing with clicks but no sales is a conversion problem, not a keyword problem.

2. Revenue per search, not relevance. Amazon is a store, so its search maximizes predicted revenue per query, not answer quality. That single fact explains why conversion rate, sales velocity, price, and reviews are ranking inputs on Amazon and near-irrelevant on Google. Optimize like a merchandiser, not just like an SEO.

3. Fields feed eligibility; behavior feeds rank. The structured fields (title, bullets, backend terms, category) tell the algorithm which queries you’re relevant for. Shopper behavior on the listing (clicks, purchases, returns) tells it how good a result you are. You can’t performance your way onto a query you have no keyword relevance for, and you can’t keyword your way past a listing that converts far better than yours.

4. Amazon’s own docs beat vendor folklore. When a claim has no Amazon source — the famous “exact factor percentages,” a named “A10 release” — downgrade it to a hypothesis. Amazon’s seller guides are thin on internal mechanics but reliable on what they do say; that’s your ground truth.

5. Marketplace SEO ≠ Google SEO. A9 is a distinct algorithm from Google’s, and from eBay’s Cassini, Etsy’s, and Walmart’s. The shared thread across marketplaces is the conversion-weighting Google doesn’t share; the specifics differ enough that you optimize per platform.

Amazon SEO — cheat sheet

Where each lever lives

Fast facts

• Algorithm nickname: A9 (after A9.com, an Amazon subsidiary founded 2003).
• “A10” = community shorthand, not an official Amazon name.
• Amazon layers AI on search: COSMO (query intentSemantic search is meaning-based retrieval — matching what a user means, not just the words they typed. Search engines detect entities, expand synonyms, infer intent, and rank by conceptual relevance, which is why keyword stuffing lost its power and topical depth gained it.) and Rufus (conversational shopping) — vendor-described, not Amazon-spec’d.
• Amazon doesn’t publish ranking-factor weights — ignore “exact percentages.”
• 2019 WSJ story: Amazon tuned search toward more profitable products; Amazon said the WSJ “has it wrong.”

Not the same as

• Ranking your own store in Google (web SEO).
• eBay (Cassini / Best Match), Etsy, Walmart — separate algorithms.

What not to do

Keyword-stuffing the title. Cramming every term you can think of into the title reads as spam to shoppers and contradicts Amazon’s own advice to include only the most important keywords and keep the title readable. It also wastes the space that actually sells the click.

Treating “exact factor percentages” as real. The “relevance is X%, seller performance is Y%” breakdowns copied across vendor blogs have no attributable Amazon source. Building a strategy on false precision is worse than admitting the weights are unpublished.

Citing “A10” as an official algorithm. It’s a useful label for an evolving system, but presenting it as a named, documented Amazon release overstates what’s actually known.

Ignoring conversion because you fixed the keywords. Relevance only makes you eligible. A listing that ranks but doesn’t convert will slip — price, images, reviews, and availability are ranking-relevant, not just merchandising nice-to-haves.

Conflating Amazon SEOAmazon SEO is optimizing product listings to rank in Amazon's own search results — its internal search algorithm (historically nicknamed A9, after the Amazon search subsidiary) weighs relevance to the query against performance signals like conversion rate, sales velocity, price, and reviews. It's a separate ranking system from Google, because Amazon is optimizing for revenue per search, not just relevance. with Google SEO. They’re different algorithms with different objectives. Tactics that matter for ranking your own store in Google (backlinks, on-page authority signals) don’t map cleanly to A9, and vice versa. A related trap on the Google side: expecting self-serving reviews on pages you control to earn review-snippet stars — Google’s 2019 policy tightening means those generally don’t qualify, only third-party review sites do. That’s a Google-SERP issue, but it’s the kind of thing that gets mis-attributed to “Amazon SEO” when people blur the two systems.

Tools for Amazon SEO

• Amazon Seller Central — where you edit titles, bullets, backend search terms, and category/attributes, and where the current field limits are authoritative.
• Amazon Brand Registry / A+ Content — unlocks richer descriptions and enhanced content for registered brands (helps conversion, which feeds rank).
• Product Opportunity Explorer (Seller Central) — Amazon’s own tool for demand and search-term data.
• Amazon Ads / Sponsored Products — paid placement; separate from organic rank but drives the sales velocity that influences it.
• Third-party keyword/rank tools (Helium 10, Jungle Scout, DataDive, and similar) — for shopper search-term discovery and rank tracking. Treat their algorithm explanations as informed inference, not Amazon’s spec.

Measure Amazon relevance and performance separately

Search visibility for the target query set

Metric: Impressions or tracked organic placement for the product’s priority shopper queries.

What it tells you: Whether the title, backend terms, category, and attributes make the listing eligible and competitive for the intended searches.

How to pull it: Use Amazon Seller Central’s available search-performance data and a consistent third-party rank tracker for the same ASIN/query/marketplace set.

Benchmark / realistic range: Establish a pre-change baseline by query and compare with the same query set; Amazon publishes no universal good rank or factor weighting.

Cadence: Weekly while optimizing, monthly once the query set is stable. Treat it as a leading indicator.

Search click-through rate

Metric: Clicks divided by impressions for the tracked query or listing view.

What it tells you: Whether the title, main image, price, rating display, and offer earn the click after Amazon shows the listing.

How to pull it: Use the search-query or brand analytics reporting available to the account and compare at ASIN/query level where possible.

Benchmark / realistic range: Build a baseline by query intentSemantic search is meaning-based retrieval — matching what a user means, not just the words they typed. Search engines detect entities, expand synonyms, infer intent, and rank by conceptual relevance, which is why keyword stuffing lost its power and topical depth gained it. and product type; do not import a generic marketplace CTR because result layout and competition differ.

Cadence: Weekly after changes to title, main image, price, or offer.

Listing conversion rate

Metric: Purchases divided by product-detail-page sessions for the listing.

What it tells you: Whether the product page converts after relevance earns the visit — the performance axis that feeds Amazon rank.

How to pull it: Use Seller Central business reports for sessions and ordered units, segmented to the ASIN and date window being evaluated.

Benchmark / realistic range: Compare with the listing’s own prior period and similar products in the same category and price band; there is no defensible global target.

Cadence: Weekly for active tests, monthly for the standing trend. This is a lagging outcome relative to impressions and clicks.

Sales velocity and availability

Metric: Ordered units over time, read alongside in-stock status.

What it tells you: Whether the listing sustains the purchase momentum Amazon’s performance model rewards, and whether stockouts interrupt it.

How to pull it: Trend ordered units and inventory status in Seller Central for the same ASIN and fulfillment offer.

Benchmark / realistic range: Use the product’s seasonal baseline and comparable catalog cohort; volume depends on category demand, price, and inventory.

Cadence: Daily for inventory risk, weekly for velocity, with seasonal and promotion annotations.

Resources worth your time

My related writing

• The Beginner’s Guide to Ecommerce SEO — where marketplace listings sit alongside ranking your own store.
• The Beginner’s Guide to Technical SEO — the fundamentals that apply when Amazon listing URLs get crawled by Google.
• Duplicate Content: Why It Happens and How to Fix It — relevant to templated marketplace listings on the public-web side.

My speaking

• How Search Works (SlideShare) — my walkthrough of how web search ranks, useful as the contrast case for how a marketplace algorithm differs. (My standing disclaimer applies: “This is my understanding of systems… not going to be 100% complete or accurate.”)

From around the industry

• Amazon SEO: 7 ways to improve your product’s search rankings (Sell on Amazon) — Amazon’s own definition and documented tactics; the primary source.
• Improve product visibility through effective Amazon keyword research (Sell on Amazon) — Amazon’s keyword and backend-term guidance.
• A9.com (Wikipedia) — the history of the Amazon search subsidiary the “A9” name comes from.
• Amazon tweaked its search to promote more profitable products, WSJ reports (CNBC) — coverage of the 2019 WSJ story and Amazon’s denial.
• Amazon A9 Algorithm: 2024 SEO Tips & Best Practices (Jungle Scout) — a widely-cited seller-tooling explainer of the A9 model (vendor perspective).

Test yourself: Amazon SEO

Five quick questions on how Amazon’s search ranks products. Pick an answer for each, then check.

Amazon SEO

Amazon SEO is optimizing product listings to rank in Amazon's own search results — its internal search algorithm (historically nicknamed A9, after the Amazon search subsidiary) weighs relevance to the query against performance signals like conversion rate, sales velocity, price, and reviews. It's a separate ranking system from Google, because Amazon is optimizing for revenue per search, not just relevance.

Related: Category Page SEO

Amazon SEO

Amazon SEO is the practice of optimizing product listings — titles, bullet points, descriptions, backend search terms, images, price, and reviews — to rank higher in Amazon’s own search results. Amazon describes it in its seller documentation as “a number of strategies you can use to improve product and brand visibility in Amazon search results.”

Amazon’s search runs on its own internal ranking system, historically nicknamed A9 after A9.com, the Amazon search subsidiary founded in 2003 that developed the technology. (“A10” is community shorthand for the evolved version — it is not an official Amazon name.) Unlike Google, which ranks web pages mostly on relevance and authority, Amazon’s algorithm scores a listing on two axes: how well it matches the shopper’s query (title, bullets, backend keywords) and how well it performs once shown (conversion rate, sales velocity, price competitiveness, reviews). Because the marketplace is optimizing for revenue per search, those conversion signals carry weight that has no direct equivalent in web search.

Amazon SEO is distinct from ranking your own store in Google, and distinct from the other marketplaces’ systems (eBay’s Cassini/Best Match, Etsy’s and Walmart’s listing-quality models) — each is a separate algorithm. It belongs to the broader discipline of marketplace SEO.

Related: Category Page SEO