Amazon Rufus ads, now in Alexa for Shopping

Ad formats in Amazon's shopping assistant

Amazon Ads describes two formats for Alexa for Shopping, the assistant that replaced Rufus as a separate product²¹:

• Sponsored ads surface relevant products and brands within a shopping conversation.
• Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands prompts are AI-written questions shown in shopping results and on product pages. They open a conversation with the assistant.

Amazon says existing sponsored ads campaigns are automatically eligible to serve in Alexa for Shopping and to be optimized as prompts, with no extra setup². On Alexa-enabled devices, Amazon also sells Alexa+ conversational ads, which put brand messages inside spoken or on-screen dialogue².

How Sponsored Prompts are created

A Sponsored Products prompt is about one product, and a Sponsored Brands prompt is about the brand as a whole. Amazon generates the prompts and the written answers from your product detail page, your Brand Store and your campaign keywords⁴. Your listing content is the main thing you control.

Billing and reporting

Prompts moved from beta to general availability in the US on March 25, 2026, and are billed per click³¹. A pitch deck shared with ad buyers and reported in April 2026 also described prompt-level reporting on clicks and conversions, with the option to pause individual prompts⁵. The Amazon Ads console has a Prompts report covering impressions, clicks and purchases⁴, and Amazon says its closed-loop measurement extends to these agentic formats².

Rufus or Alexa for Shopping?

Since May 13, 2026, US shoppers use one assistant, Alexa for Shopping, on the Amazon app, the website and Echo Show devices. It combines Rufus's product knowledge with Alexa+¹. Sellers and advertisers still often say "Rufus", so this page uses both names.