Tech and AI
Amazon is planning a “World Product Graph” to list every product sold online, including ones it doesn’t sell, Reuters reports
- What happened
- An internal Amazon document describes a database of every product sold anywhere on the internet, to be shown on Amazon’s own site, The Verge reports, citing Reuters.
- Why it matters
- The aim is to keep shoppers and AI shopping agents from doing their research on Reddit or Google, and to fix Amazon’s own error-prone shopping assistant.
- What’s next
- Reuters says it is unclear if or when the plan will happen; the document gives a release date of 1 October 2027.
Full story
A catalogue of everything
Amazon is planning to build a store of data on every product sold anywhere on the internet, including products Amazon itself does not sell, and to make that information available through its own site, The Verge reported, citing Reuters. The project is called the “World Product Graph”.
According to the report, the goal is to make shoppers less likely to leave Amazon to research products on Reddit or Google, and more likely to end up on Amazon even when they are looking for something sold elsewhere. Links to other retailers’ products already appear on Amazon through the “shop direct” feature it launched last year. In effect, Amazon wants product searches to start on its pages wherever the purchase is finally made.
Built for AI agents too
The same logic applies to AI agents, which increasingly shop on people’s behalf, The Verge said: if Amazon holds the largest stock of shopping data, agents may rely on its product index over others, so people who shop through bots would still land on Amazon’s pages.
The project is also meant to fix problems with Amazon’s own AI shopping assistant, Alexa for Shopping, previously called Rufus. An internal document seen by Reuters says “many Rufus answers are factually wrong or incomplete” and that running users’ searches through the AI is expensive. More data is meant to make the assistant more accurate and able to run on cheaper models, according to the report.
Not yet a plan
Whether it ships is uncertain. The document reportedly says the project “depends on discovering how brands organize their products on their own websites”, which The Verge said could involve Amazon crawling other retailers’ sites. Reuters said it was unclear if or when the plan would be carried out, although the document gives a release date of 1 October 2027.
“Draft, outdated documents often paint an incomplete picture and the existence of a brainstorming document such as this one doesn’t necessarily reflect our current plans.”
Amazon, in a statement to Reuters, The Verge
