How Amazon SEO works and what decides your rank

A9 was the name of an Amazon subsidiary, A9.com, that worked on search and advertising technology, and sellers adopted the name for Amazon’s product search ranking. A10 is not an official Amazon name. It is a label that sellers and tool vendors began using for later changes to how Amazon ranks products. You will not find A10 in Amazon’s own documentation.

The name matters less than the principle. Amazon’s goal is to show shoppers the products they are most likely to buy for a given search. Amazon describes search results as being based on factors such as relevance and how products perform, and it updates its systems continually. Anyone who claims to know the exact formula is guessing.

What we can do is separate the factors Amazon describes in its seller guidance from the patterns sellers consistently observe, and work on both.

Being indexed means Amazon will consider your product for a search at all. Words in the title, bullet points, description, backend search terms and many attributes can make a product eligible for a search. Placement in the title signals the strongest relevance, so put the main product type and the most important two or three terms there.

Backend search terms have rules. Do not repeat words already in the title, do not use other brands’ names or ASINs, and do not include claims such as ‘new’ or ‘on sale’. Separate words with spaces; you do not need commas, and you do not need every word order or plural, because Amazon matches common variants.

Being indexed is not the same as ranking. A product can be eligible for a search and sit on page five. Rank comes from performance against competing products for that same search, which is where conversion rate and sales history come in.

Ads do not buy organic rank directly. What they do is generate sales for specific search terms, and those sales count in the product’s overall history. Many sellers see organic rank improve on terms where ads drive consistent, profitable sales, which is why PPC and SEO should be planned together rather than by separate people working from separate keyword lists. When one person owns both, every keyword decision considers paid and organic visibility at the same time.

In practice, that means three things. Advertise on the search terms you want to rank for, not only the cheapest ones. Watch organic rank and TACoS, not just ACoS, so you can see whether ads are lifting organic sales. And once a term ranks well organically, test whether you can lower its bid without losing total sales.

Amazon’s shopping assistant, Rufus, adds another reason to write clear, complete listings. It draws on product detail pages, reviews and customer questions to answer shoppers, so a listing that plainly answers the questions buyers ask is easier for both the search engine and the assistant to match to the right shopper.