Sponsored Prompts: Are Amazon’s AI Ads Worth It Yet?

If you run Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands campaigns, there’s a good chance you’re already paying for ads inside Amazon’s shopping AI. Most brands I talk to don’t know it.

What Sponsored Prompts are

Sponsored Prompts are ads that show up inside Amazon’s AI shopping conversations, first in Rufus and now in Alexa for Shopping. They look like suggested questions, such as “Why choose [your brand]?” When a shopper taps one, the AI answers with your product.

Here’s the part that matters: Amazon writes them, not you. The prompts and answers are generated from your product page, your Brand Store and your campaign keywords. So the quality of your ad depends on the quality of your listing.

You’re probably already enrolled

On March 25, 2026, Sponsored Prompts left beta and became paid, on a cost per click basis. Active Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns were enrolled automatically, with controls to pause individual prompts in Ads Console. If you’ve been running ads since spring, some of your clicks have been coming from inside the AI.

What the early data says

The honest answer is mixed.

• Volume is small. Reporting from The Information found one seller doing $20 to $30 million a year recorded just 88 clicks from Sponsored Prompts since January.
• Engagement is real. Amazon says about 20% of shoppers who see a Sponsored Brands prompt keep talking about that brand.
• The best use right now is learning. Analysts at eMarketer suggest treating them as a research tool more than a sales driver, using the prompt data to see what shoppers ask and to sharpen your product page.

How we handle them

We don’t treat Sponsored Prompts as a separate budget line yet. Here’s what we do instead:

1. Fix the listing first. The AI builds the ad from your listing. If your bullets are vague or your attributes are blank, the ad will be too. Paying for a spot in the conversation doesn’t help if the AI can’t explain why you’re the answer.
2. Watch the prompt reports. Amazon now reports which prompts led to clicks. Those questions are free customer research. When a question shows up there that your listing doesn’t answer, we add the answer.
3. Judge on profit, not clicks. Same rule as every other ad. If a placement doesn’t add profit you wouldn’t have gotten anyway, it’s not working.

This is the same reason we get paid on revenue, not ad spend. We have no reason to push you into a new ad format just because it’s new. If you want the background on that, read /blog/acos-vs-tacosACoS vs. TACoS.

Source: Amazon Ads: prompts, reporting and pause controls

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Troy Marchand, CEO

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