Here’s a quick roundup of last week’s news:

Chart of the week 📈:

Amazon released booming Q2 numbers this week:

• Net sales increased 20% year-over-year

• Operating income was $27.5 billion, up 43% year-over-year

• AWS net sales increased 37%—its fastest growth in 18 quarters—to a $169 billion annualized revenue run rate

• Alexa drives Average Order Value up +40%

Autopilot’s Weekly Search Pulse 🔎

On Linkedin I started publishing a daily search pulse on core category & brand trends, this weeks content featured. Full coverage on Linkedin & X.

Insights from This Week on Search Pulse (Wk 30)

• Mon · glue sticks — Elmer’s extends to 32.7% as back-to-school switches on

• Tue · cat litter — Fresh Step jumps #2 → #1, passing Purina’s Tidy Cats

• Wed · vacuum — Bissell breaks a three-way tie

• Thu · cottage cheese — Good Culture passes Daisy Brand on the high-protein trend

• Fri · paddle board — FunWater’s share goes 4.7× in a week

Here’s this week’s top 10 trend summary for 2025 vs 2026:

AI News of the week:

AI Search is quickly accelerating as new numbers from OpenAI and Google Gemini become public. We are about to see the first holiday season, where AI search starts moving the needle. Autopilot dug into this, more details in “Christmas, in August”

“Of the 900 million people who use ChatGPT every week, around 20% of conversations carry shopping intent — and at least 2% are specific product searches.

• Those shopping conversations span the whole buying journey: 31% product discovery, 22% comparison, 23% evaluating a specific product, 13% at the purchase stage. (Linkedin)

• 6% of Gemini conversations are consumer purchases — and the Gemini app alone has 900 million monthly active users. (Google)”

Movers & Shakers 🙌

• Whatnot is in talks to raise a new funding round at a $20 billion valuation [Business Insider]

Strategy ♟

• Amazon got $600 million in Trump tariff refunds and will pass return along to some customers [CNBC]

• Amazon says groceries and essentials are growing ‘meaningfully faster’ than the rest of its Stores business [Modern Retail]

• Meta; Introducing Seller, an App for Facebook Marketplace Sellers [Meta]

• If AI Mode becomes the default, 95% of Google Shopping visibility disappears [Productrise]

• Time has started serving ads to AI agents [Digiday]

• eBay reaches $56M settlement with e-commerce newsletter writers it terrorized in 2019 [TechCrunch]

• Shein’s Localization Never Arrived [Marketplace Pulse]
  

Events 🎤

• Salt Lake City eCom Summit, SLC, Aug 20

• Brandtech Connect @ IFA, Berlin, Sep 5

• Amazon Accelerate, Seattle, Sep 22-24

• Amazon unBoxed, San Francisco, Sep 28-30

• Social Commerce Summit, Los Angeles, Oct 14-16

Make this week count 🙌

Christian

Share 📦 The Order

Here’s a quick roundup of last week’s news:

Chart of the week 📈:

Marketplace Pulse in ‘Amazon Business Reaches $60 Billion’ highlights how the business scaled to $60B within 10 years.

Largest Alexa for Shopping Study Published 📚

This week our large scale study on Alexa’s Third Shelf rolled out. You can access it for free here: https://www.autopilotbrand.com/thirdshelf

1. You’ll find the core study summarizing our findings across 70,000 ASINs

2. A second 700-page download with prompt examples across 900 brands

3. You’d like a your core term to be included in our next study? Drop a comment on Linkedin

Autopilot’s Weekly Search Pulse 🔎

On Linkedin I started publishing a daily search pulse on core category & brand trends, this weeks content featured. Full coverage on Linkedin & X.

Insights from This Week on Search Pulse (Wk 29)

• Mon · headphones — Soundcore overtakes JBL for the #1 click

• Tue · yoga mat — Amazon Basics seizes #1 from specialist Gaiam

• Wed · walking pad — booming fitness search, zero recognizable brands leading

• Thu · compression socks — FITFEL’s 28% lead vanishes in one week

• Fri · dehumidifier — ToLife overtakes BEDRED as summer humidity peaks

Here’s this week’s top 10 trend summary for 2025 vs 2026:

AI News of the week:

Researchers from Peec AI showed that the site operator (i.e. the brand domain) is the leading source in 84% of ChatGPT 5.6 Fan out queries. When product search is performed, ChatGPT creates fan out queries to retrieve product information from the site.

Movers & Shakers 🙌

• Private Equity firm Cinven to Acquire Salsify for an undisclosed amount [Salsify]

Strategy ♟

• Amazon Plans to Incubate 2,000 New Chinese Billion-Yuan Brands Over Three Years [Chinasellers Substack]

• Amazon cuts some jobs in its artificial general intelligence unit [CNBC]

• How Whatnot’s AI-powered recommendation system gives it a competitive edge [Modern Retail]

• Michaels says Google-powered AI assistant doubles conversion rate of traditional search [Modern Retail]

• The back-to-school denim wars are starting earlier and lasting longer [Modern Retail]

• Nike to cut off thousands of online distributors in China, restructure digital footprint [CNBC]

• AliExpress hit with record $625M fine after failing to make EU-ordered fixes [Ars Technica]

Events 🎤

• Amazon Accelerate, Seattle, Sep 22-24

• Amazon unBoxed, San Francisco, Sep 28-30

• Social Commerce Summit, Los Angeles, Oct 14-16

Make this week count 🙌

Christian

Share 📦 The Order

If you want your own search term mapped — every product the AI recommends for it, with exact ranks and ad status — we’re doing that free for brands on LinkedIn right now. Comment your term on the launch post here & we'll include the term in our next study: 👉 Linkedin Post - Just comment Alexa: ‘Your Term’

Every brand on Amazon manages two shelves. The organic shelf, where rank is earned. The paid shelf, where placement is bought. Both are instrumented to death: rank trackers, share-of-voice dashboards, bid managers.

Amazon has quietly added a third one.

When shoppers use Amazon’s AI assistant — the Rufus engine, now becoming Alexa for Shopping — it doesn’t return a results page. It recommends a handful of products in its own words. That recommendation set is a shelf: it decides what gets seen, and it is built by a different logic than the page it sits on top of.

We wanted to know what that logic is. So we measured it — at, to our knowledge, a scale nobody has published before.

What we did

We ran 1,963 non-branded queries — “steam mop”, “collagen”, “eye cream”, the terms brands actually compete on — through Amazon’s AI assistant, and captured the full first-page search results in the same session: 109,244 search listings, organic and sponsored — 70,176 distinct products across the full study. Then we matched the assistant’s 13,177 recommendations to their exact position on the page a shopper would have seen instead — 12,810 of them, after excluding 367 picks whose page capture failed; the numbers below use that valid set.

The result is a crosswalk between the shelf brands manage and the shelf the AI builds. Here is what it shows.

1. The AI decouples from your rank nearly two-thirds of the time

Only 36.1% of the AI’s picks come from the organic top-10 — the slice of the page rank tracking watches. 20.6% come from deeper on page one, ranks 11–48. 2.4% are advertised but unranked. And 40.9% aren’t anywhere on the captured first page at all — beyond the ~48 organic ranks the page holds, and invisible to any first-page view of the market.

Add it up: 63.9% of everything the AI recommends sits outside the organic top-10. If your Amazon reporting starts and ends with rank, you cannot see most of this shelf — yours or your competitors’.

One nuance worth knowing: the AI’s first pick is still fairly conventional — it lands in the organic top-10 about 55% of the time. By the last pick in a recommendation set, that drops to about 12%. The assistant anchors on a familiar product, then diversifies fast.

2. What that looks like on one real query

Aggregates hide the texture, so take a single query from the study: “steam mop.” The assistant recommended seven products. Three came from the organic top-10. Two came from ranks 16 and 31 — below where most shoppers ever scroll. And two weren’t on the captured page at all.

Seven picks, four of them outside the organic top-10 — and two of them beyond the captured page entirely. This pattern, at varying intensity, repeats across the full query set.

3. Ads alone can’t buy it

The obvious follow-up: fine, rank doesn’t decide the shelf — surely ad spend does?

The data says no. Sponsored placements make up 20.7% of the search page, but only 14.3% of the AI’s picks were running an ad anywhere on that page — and 83% of those already ranked organically. Products that were advertised but not ranked account for just 2.4% of all picks. Ad density inside the AI’s recommendation set is 0.69× the page around it.

The pattern reads less like “ads earn picks” and more like “ads ride winners”: the products the AI selects tend to be strong enough that brands were already advertising them. As a working assumption, “we’ll buy our way into AI visibility” is not supported by what we measured.

4. What actually travels with a pick

If not top-10 position and not ads — what? We modeled the AI’s choices against six signals available on the page. Among the picks visible on the captured page, organic rank is the dominant correlate — picked products sit at a median rank of 7 versus 25 for the page around them. That sounds like a contradiction until you remember 40.9% of picks aren’t on the captured page at all: where the AI shops the page, it favors well-ranked products; it just doesn’t stop there. After rank, the durable correlates are sales velocity (Amazon’s “X+ bought last month” label, shown on 83% of listings — picks carry a median of 3,000 versus 900 for the page) and review depth (picks have roughly 3.5× more reviews). Star ratings add only a small positive signal, price shows no meaningful independent association once quality is controlled, and the Amazon’s Choice badge adds nothing once quality signals are accounted for.

Two honest caveats. The model can only see the captured page — it says nothing about the 40.9% of picks sourced beyond it. And the study is observational: one capture, associations rather than causes. These are correlates brands can test, not levers the study proved.

5. It’s not one weird category

Every category we measured has a third shelf. Apparel is the most decoupled major category — 75% of picks outside the organic top-10 — followed by Home & Kitchen (60%), Beauty (54.3%) and Health & Supplements (53.6%). Long-tail queries are the most decoupled of all (80.2%): the thinner the query, the more the assistant departs from the page.

What to do about it

Four moves follow directly from the evidence:

1. Instrument the shelf. Track which AI picks are yours, separately from organic rank — rank dashboards under-count AI presence by design.

2. Write for shopper intent. Queries phrased as needs (“top rated for seniors”) surfaced different products than keyword-style queries. Intent-rich listing language — who it’s for, what it’s used with, when, why — is the natural hypothesis to test.

3. Re-examine ad spend aimed at AI visibility. The 2.4% ad-only figure is the whole argument.

4. Pick your battles. The most decoupled categories are where rank incumbents are most exposed — and where challengers have the clearest opening.

Go deeper

Everything above comes from the open study — The Third Shelf, published by Autopilot and The Order. The white paper is free, no email required. The companion volume — The Third Shelf — Deep-Dive Library — covers all 683 fully mapped queries page by page and indexes 903 brands to where they appear. It’s free too: see if your brand is on the list.

→ Get both at autopilotbrand.com/thirdshelf

And if you want to see your own search term mapped — every product the AI recommends for it, with exact ranks and ad status — we’re doing that free for brands on LinkedIn right now. 👉 Comment your term on the launch post here to have it included.

Methodology in brief: 1,963 non-branded US queries, captured May–June 2026; assistant recommendations and full first-page results captured in the same session and matched product-by-product. Observational, single-run; associations, not causes. Full methodology, statistics and limitations in the white paper. This study is independent research and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Amazon.com, Inc. Amazon, Rufus, and Alexa are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.

Have fun with the read,

Christian

Share 📦 The Order

Here’s a quick roundup of last week’s news:

Chart of the week 📈:

This week Autopilotbrands.com Alexa study across 70,000 ASINs got featured in Marketplace Pulse: Amazon’s AI Doesn’t Read the Rankings

For a deep dive on this study, check out our upcoming webinar below.

Autopilot’s Weekly Search Pulse 🔎

On Linkedin I started publishing a daily search pulse on core category & brand trends, this weeks content featured. Full coverage on Linkedin & X.

Insights from This Week on Search Pulse (Wk 28)

• Mon · backpack — JanSport retakes #1, back-to-school

• Tue · laundry detergent — Arm & Hammer edges past Tide

• Wed · kugig toothpaste — unknown brand tightens grip, 73%

• Thu · shampoo — Garnier climbs to #1, legacy reshuffle

• Fri · water shoes — top-40 search, zero known brands

Here’s this week’s top 10 trend summary for 2025 vs 2026:

AI News of the week: Vendors get Search Data

AI News is data news this week. After all, it’s the foundation that drives AI - and in particular organic growth, and effective paid growth on Amazon.

This one is for Vendors: Amazon finally opened search traffic analytics more broadly for vendors. While it doesn’t match the 3P search query data one-to-one (mainly hiding the market share view from vendors), it does provide insights into:

1. Key search terms by ASINs

2. The performance funnel by search term & ASIN covering impressions > clicks > add-to-carts > purchases

This is a huge update for vendors looking to:

• Grow organic sales through PDP optimization ( best run on autopilotbrand.com )

• And more effectively steer their sponsored product ads

Vendors can retrieve this data under Reports > Custom Analytics > Search Traffic.

Strategy ♟

• What’s driving a surge in Amazon sales for 3 startups [Modern Retail]

• Amazon preps robotics-equipped sorting warehouse in Texas [Supply Chain Deep Dive]

• K-Beauty Dominated A Softer Amazon Prime Day For Beauty [Beauty Independent]

• Bank of America argues Amazon retail rival is major AI winner [Modern Retail]

• Online merchants welcome Trump customs crackdown amid wave of tariff evasion pitches [Modern Retail]

• Sam’s Club takes Manhattan for wellness event with creators [Modern Retail]

• 80-year-old Minnetonka banks on clogs and creators to woo new customers [Modern Retail]

Events 🎤

Deep dive into our Third Shelf analysis this week on Merchant Spring’s Marketplace Masters podcast. 👉 Sign up here.

• Amazon Accelerate, Seattle, Sep 22-24

• Amazon unBoxed, San Francisco, Sep 28-30

• Social Commerce Summit, Los Angeles, Oct 14-16

Make this week count 🙌

Christian

Share 📦 The Order

Here’s a quick roundup of last week’s news:

Chart of the week 📈:

In ‘China Won Amazon’s Top 10,000, America Kept Its Top 100’ Marketplace Pulse captures the increasing share of China-based sellers on Amazon. The US GMV share of the Top 100 Amazon sellers amounts to 93.2%, while for sellers 5,000-1,000 its 51.8% US vs 45.1% China vs 3.1% Rest of World.

Autopilot’s Weekly Search Pulse 🔎

On Linkedin I started publishing a daily search pulse on core category & brand trends, this weeks content featured. Full coverage on Linkedin & X.

Insights from This Week on Search Pulse (Wk 27)

• Mon: Bounty holds paper towels, Amazon Basics slips

• Tue: Unknown brand VEMBR owns 82% of castor oil

• Wed: Frigidaire dethrones GE as AC searches explode

• Thu: Intex owns the July 4th backyard pool

• Fri: No fashion label owns women’s swimwear

Here’s this week’s top 10 trend summary for 2025 vs 2026:

AI News of the week:

PYMNTs digs into how AI bots are creating a new commerce storefront (hint: and we have some research coming out of that soon!).

🧧 If you want to get a sneak-peak on how you can leverage insights gathered on Amazon, to drive citations in AI conversations, send me a note & we’ll get you a preview.

Strategy ♟

• Amazon’s New FBA Restock Limits Are Pushing Sellers Toward Hybrid 3PL Models [eCommerce Times]

• Amazon’s Rufus AI Is Now Influencing Buy Box Outcomes — And Sellers Are Scrambling [eCommerce Times]

• Amazon documents reveal a costly new Alexa AI project [Business Insider]

• Back-to-School spending to dip 6% amid economic worries, Deloitte forecasts [Yahoo]

• Back-to-school shoppers head to mass merchants, department stores [Retail Dive]

• Shopify tells users to remove vapes from online stores [Reuters]

• The global e-commerce playbook is being rewritten in emerging markets [The Business Times]

Events 🎤

In New York on July 16th? Apply to join our aperitivo 🍸 for 10 select brands here

• Amazon Seller Growth Summit, New York, July 16

• Amazon Accelerate, Seattle, Sep 22-24

• Amazon unBoxed, San Francisco, Sep 28-30

Make this week count 🙌

Christian

Share 📦 The Order

Here’s a quick roundup of last week’s news:

Chart of the week 📈:

Nike’s eCommerce problem: Digital sales continue their decline [Digital Commerce 360]

Autopilot’s Weekly Search Pulse 🔎

On Linkedin I started publishing a daily search pulse on core category & brand trends, this weeks content featured. Full coverage on Linkedin & X.

Insights from This Week on Search Pulse (Wk 26)

• Mon — protein powder: Optimum Nutrition holds #1 as searches climb for summer.

• Tue — sunscreen: Neutrogena leads, +92 spots in a week before the July 4th weekend.

• Wed — air fryer: Chefman quietly beats Instant Pot and Ninja for the top click.

• Thu — owala: Owala becomes Amazon’s #1 search overall, passing Stanley and Yeti.

• Fri — oura ring: a third-party knockoff (LevyPan) outranks Oura on its own name.

Here’s this week’s top 10 trend summary for 2025 vs 2026:

AI News of the week:

Apparel brands are winning valuable marketing space with Amazon’s new title & item highlights. Autopilot has the details here.

Movers & Shakers 🙌

• Komerz acquires UK haircare brand NOUGHTY for £6.4 million [Mediabrief]

• 3P revenue recovery business divested back to previous owners: SPS Commerce Announces Agreement to Sell 3P Revenue Recovery Business [SPS Commerce]

Strategy ♟

• Shadow bribery market inside Amazon preys on desperate sellers [LA Times]

• Back-to-school season has become a summer-long event, thanks to an earlier Prime Day [Modern Retail]

• Online merchants welcome Trump customs crackdown amid wave of tariff evasion pitches [Modern Retail]

• Prime Day results suggest shoppers are saving splurges for Black Friday [Modern Retail]

• How ChatGPT ads are forcing brands to rethink GEO and paid strategy [Ad Age]

• EU slaps €3 fee on cheap ecommerce parcels in blow to Shein, Temu, AliExpress [Reuters]

Events 🎤

In New York on July 16th? Apply to join our aperitivo 🍸 for 10 select brands here

• Amazon Seller Growth Summit, New York, July 16

• Amazon Accelerate, Seattle, Sep 22-24

• Amazon unBoxed, San Francisco, Sep 28-30

Make this week count 🙌

Christian

Share 📦 The Order

Here’s a quick roundup of last week’s news:

Chart of the week 📈: Prime Day Insights

Adobe published Prime Day 2026 spending insights

Read more

Here’s a quick roundup of last week’s news:

Chart of the week 📈

In ‘TikTok Shop Sells Personal Transformation’ Marketplace Pulse digs into TikTok product categories:

Autopilot’s Weekly Search Pulse 🔎

On Linkedin I started publishing a daily search pulse on core category & brand trends, this weeks content featured. Full coverage on Linkedin &

Read more

Here’s a quick roundup of last week’s news:

Chart of the week 📈

Marketplace Pulse dug into the revenue concentration on TikTok shop in ‘On TikTok Shop, 1% of Sellers Drive 60% of GMV’

Autopilot’s Weekly Search Pulse 🔎

On Linkedin I started publishing a daily search pulse on core category & brand trends, this weeks content featured. Full cove…

Read more

Here’s a quick roundup of last week’s news:

Chart of the week 📈

In ‘Walmart Marketplace Growth Reaches Fastest Pace in Years’ Marketplace Pulse covers Walmarts 50% YoY Q1 growth of its third party marketplace:

Autopilot’s Weekly Search Pulse 🔎

On Linkedin I started publishing a daily search pulse on core category & brand trends, this weeks c…

Read more

Here’s a quick roundup of last week’s news:

Chart of the Week:

Jason Goldberg’s recent post highlights TikTok’s acceleration:

Movers & Shakers 🤖

• Here’s to an aggregator success story 🎉: Church & Dwight Announces Miss Mouth’s Messy Eater® Brand Acquisition [Business Wire]

• Global-e to Enhance Logistics Offering with Acquisition of Passport, a …

Read more

Here’s a quick roundup of last week’s news:

Chart of the Week:

U.S. e-commerce posted a 9.8% Q1, but roughly half was price, not volume, and much of the rest was financed by a 33%+ jump in BNPL borrowing at Affirm and Klarna. Marketplace Pulse breaks down why the "10% quarter" was weaker than it looked.

🆕 Introducing a new part of The Order…

Read more

Here’s a quick roundup of last week’s news:

Chart of the Week:

US, India & Japan lead top Amazon marketplaces by monthly web visits. Marketplace Pulse’s ‘Amazon’s Least Competitive Marketplace Is Now Everywhere’ has the details:

AI News 🤖

Amazon beefed up Alexa this week by moving its Rufus beta into Alexa for shopping: ‘Meet Alexa for Shopp…

Read more

Here’s a quick roundup of last week’s news:

Chart of the Week:

Marketplace Pulse dig into the evolution of AI search ads this week: “Rufus, ChatGPT, and the Agentic Ad Convergence”:

AI News 🤖

OpenAI launched their self-serve ads manager and cost-per-click bidding. More details in ‘New ways to buy ChatGPT ads’:

Read more

Here’s a quick roundup of last week’s news:

Chart of the Week #1:

Amazon’s results this week showed a shrinking 3P share, both versus vendor and also as part of its growing overall business. 3P Seller Services are up 14% YoY.

Marketplace Pulse digs in further in ‘Amazon Is Regaining 1P Unit Share’:

Read more

Here’s a quick roundup of last week’s news:

Chart of the Week:

Marketplace Pulse shared ‘How Marketplace Sellers Are Using AI’ this week: Great to see listing optimization being the biggest area of highest measurable positive impact. Autopilot computes organic listing impact now bottom up for each keyword and ASIN. You can give it a try here

Read more

Here’s a quick roundup of last week’s news:

Chart of the Week:

Nielsen released its 2026 Beauty Trends this week. Full report here, highlights below:

Read more

Here’s a quick roundup of last week’s news:

Chart of the Week #1:

Wolf Street dug into the seasonality patterns of retail. We know seasonal swings are heavily driving upside, and opportunity, for each product - but here’s the macro view:

‘Seasonally adjusted, retail sales in February jumped by 0.6% from January, to a record $738 billion (red…

Read more

Here’s a quick roundup of last week’s news:

Chart of the Week #1:

Marketplace Pulse published their seller index pulse this week.

Those sellers that saw AI driving successful gains for their business, highlighted Listing Optimization as their number 1 driver.

We are not surprised. Check out www.autopilotbrand.com where you can leverage this…

Read more

Here’s a quick roundup of last week’s news:

Chart of the Week:

Container spot rates are on the rise - the Drewry World Container Index (US$/40ft) hits $2,279 (+20% from end of Feb):

AI News:

OpenAI released a new form of powering product discovery in ChatGPT, powered by its Agentic Commerce Protocol:

Read more