If you run Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands campaigns on Amazon, your ads are now doing something you may not have set up: they're generating AI-powered question-and-answer prompts inside Alexa for Shopping. These are called Sponsored Prompts, and they went from open beta to general availability on March 25, 2026. That means they're on by default, they're now being charged at CPC, and they're appearing in a placement most sellers haven't thought much about yet.
Here's what they are, how they work, and what you actually need to do about them.
What Sponsored Prompts Are
When a shopper interacts with Alexa for Shopping, the AI doesn't just return a list of products. It generates conversational prompts: questions and short answers about products in context. Your sponsored listing can surface inside one of these prompts, in a format that looks more like a recommendation from an assistant than a traditional ad.
There are two types. Product prompts are ASIN-level: a specific question about your product gets answered with content pulled from your detail page, A+ Content, and Brand Store. Brand prompts are broader discovery questions where your brand gets surfaced as a relevant option within a category conversation. Both types draw on Amazon's first-party signals, which means your listing content quality directly determines what the prompts say about your product.
Amazon introduced these in November 2025 as a free beta and spent several months collecting data. The charge started March 25. If your campaigns haven't been audited since then, you've been accruing CPC charges on a placement you may not have reviewed. The prompts are visible in Ad Console under Campaign, then Ad Group, then Ads, then the Prompts tab.
The Attribution Question Nobody Has Cleanly Answered
Here's the part that matters most for optimization, and where Amazon's current setup creates some genuine complexity. When a shopper clicks your ad, lands on your product detail page, and then clicks a Sponsored Prompt that opens inside Alexa for Shopping, the question is: where does the conversion get attributed?
If the sale attributes to the prompt and not to the originating sponsored ad click, you end up optimizing the original ad toward zero sales, even though it was the ad that brought the customer to the page in the first place. That's a measurement problem that could cause you to underbid or pause campaigns that are actually working, because their last-click attribution is being captured by the downstream prompt.
Amazon has not published a definitive answer on this. What practitioners are observing is that prompt attribution appears in a separate Prompts report rather than flowing back to the originating campaign's conversion metrics. If that's correct, the safest assumption is to treat prompts as incremental rather than cannibalistic, but you should verify by pulling your Prompts report and comparing it against conversion trends in the campaigns with the most prompt activity.
What Your Listing Content Now Does to Your Ads
Sponsored Prompts pull content directly from your detail page, A+ Content, and Brand Store to generate the prompt text. This means your listing quality now affects not just your organic ranking and conversion rate but also what your paid placements say when they appear in AI-generated conversations.
A listing with clear, factual, well-structured bullets and A+ Content gives the AI clean material to work with. A listing with vague marketing language, inconsistent specs, or thin A+ gives it poor material, and the prompts it generates will reflect that. For the first time, weak listing content can directly degrade your paid advertising performance in a placement where Amazon is doing the copywriting for you.
The practical action here is to audit your top-spending ASINs for prompt-readiness. Your bullets should answer specific questions a buyer might ask an AI assistant: what it is, what it's for, what makes it different, and any relevant specifications. If the answer to "what are the key features of this product" isn't immediately extractable from your detail page, your Sponsored Prompts are working with incomplete information. This is exactly the kind of listing optimization our Amazon account management work covers.
The Broader Ad Market Context
Sponsored Prompts are arriving at an interesting moment for Amazon advertising overall. Tinuiti's Q1 2026 Digital Ads Benchmark Report, published this week, shows Sponsored Products clicks up more than 19% year over year for the fourth consecutive quarter, with average CPC rising 2%, the first increase since Q1 2025. Advertisers spent 21% more on Sponsored Products in Q1 2026 compared to Q1 2025. Sponsored Brands tells a different story: spend up 3%, but clicks down 10% and CPC up 14%.
The Sponsored Brands trend is particularly relevant context for prompts. If clicks on standard Sponsored Brands placements are declining even as spend rises, it suggests that search real estate is getting more competitive and more expensive at the top. Prompts represent a different kind of placement, conversational and contextual rather than keyword-matched, and they may perform differently than traditional sponsored placements for the same ASINs. Tracking them separately and not blending their performance into your overall campaign view is important for understanding what's actually happening.
What to Do This Week
Check the Prompts tab in your Ad Console. Pull the Prompts report (available under Reports, category Sponsored Products, report type Prompts) and see which of your campaigns have prompt activity and what the metrics look like. If you see high impression volume with low click rates, your prompt content may not be compelling enough, which points back to listing quality. If you see strong click rates with no visible conversion data, that's the attribution question in action and worth investigating further.
You can pause individual prompts if you want to isolate their effect. That's a reasonable experiment to run on one campaign to understand what happens to overall conversion when prompts are off versus on. Amazon gives you that control at the ad level, and it's worth using before you draw any conclusions about whether prompts are helping or hurting.
If you want help pulling apart what Sponsored Prompts are actually doing in your account and how to think about them alongside your broader ad strategy, schedule a call with us. This is a new enough placement that most brands are still figuring out what it means for their optimization approach, and we're already working through it with our current clients.