Amazon’s Rufus Chatbot Ads Are Generating Data but Driving Minimal Sales, With Sponsored Prompts Accounting for Less Than 1% of Clicks

Amazon's sponsored prompts, a new ad format that triggers chatbot conversations within its Rufus shopping assistant, are seeing very limited traction so far, with one $20-30M Amazon seller recording just 88 clicks from the format since January compared to 500,000 clicks from all other Amazon ads combined, and the format accounting for less than 1% of total clicks in sponsored product campaigns. The upside is that sponsored prompts cost roughly 31 cents per click compared to 50-70 cents for traditional Amazon ads, and the data Amazon provides, including which products appeared in response to specific prompts and sample AI responses, is giving marketers useful insight into how Amazon's AI selects products and what questions shoppers are asking. A key limitation is that Amazon's current approach generates brand-specific prompts rather than category-level ones, meaning the ads primarily reach shoppers who already know a brand rather than those still in discovery mode, which undermines the core promise of conversational advertising.