Now that Amazon Rufus gets a shopping memory and uses full purchase histories for recommendations, should sellers adjust their strategy to stay competitive?
Amazon sellers rely on visibility, but competition only grows tighter.
With 2 billion daily searches and Rufus already powering 13.7% of them in October 2024, Amazon’s AI is becoming a bigger part of how buyers shop.
Now that Amazon Rufus gets a shopping memory, are your current strategies strong enough to compete?
Amazon Rufus Adds Shopping History Memory, But Seller Impact Remains Limited
Oleksandr Kovalov, ANavigator CEO"Amazon’s Rufus just entered a new era: memory + context."
Amazon has rolled out new features to Rufus, its AI shopping assistant, including the ability to remember order history and summarize customer reviews. While the upgrades show progress, adoption among buyers remains low.
Steven Pope, founder of our Amazon agency, shared in a YouTube video about the latest Rufus upgrade. He tested the tool by asking how many computer mice he had purchased on Amazon, and Rufus accurately pulled 12 orders with dates and links. Features like this allow shoppers to quickly revisit past purchases without manually searching through their accounts.
How Rufus Helps Shoppers
Rufus now answers specific product questions, pulling details from listings, reviews, and community Q&A. For example, customers can ask:
“What material is this backpack made of?”
“What do customers say about its durability?”
“What’s new in the latest Fire HD10 Kids tablet?”
The tool can also:
- Summarize reviews around key themes such as weight, value, and appearance.
- Compare products like TVs or shoes.
- Suggest items for events, such as birthday gifts or party supplies.
Shopping History Becomes Personalized Search
Rufus can analyze a customer’s purchase history to recommend products. Pope tested this by asking which candy he might like based on past orders. Rufus recognized his preference for fruit-based gummies and organic snacks, an answer he found accurate given his household of five children.
Event Planning Features
Some analysts argue Rufus is shifting from a search tool to a “commerce engine.” It now generates structured shopping lists for events such as children’s parties or weddings, organizing products into categories like decorations, activities, and favors. However, Pope noted a drawback: the current desktop version doesn’t allow customers to add all recommended items to their cart with one click, limiting convenience.
Should Sellers Be Concerned?
Despite these advancements, Pope believes sellers should remain cautious about overreacting. “There’s still too much hype compared to real customer adoption,” he explained. He estimates fewer than 3 out of 100 Amazon purchases currently rely on Rufus.
For now, the fundamentals of Amazon SEO remain unchanged. Sellers should continue to:
- Optimize main images to drive click-through rate (CTR).
- Use 100-character titles and keyword-rich bullet points.
- Fill backend search terms, including Spanish where applicable.
- Build A+ Content with at least 500 words of crawlable text.
Amazon Rufus Gets a Shopping Memory. Is this the End of SEO?
In his latest newsletter, Jon Elder shared that Amazon quietly rolled out a historic upgrade to its AI assistant called “Shopping Memory.” This feature fundamentally alters how the platform understands customer behavior and recommends products.
Previously, Rufus responded to questions based on immediate search queries and website data. Now, the AI has a persistent memory of a user’s complete shopping patterns and history on the platform.
This new capability means Rufus analyzes a wide range of a shopper’s long-term data points. It now considers everything from past purchases to abandoned cart items, including:
- All past Amazon orders and their frequency
- The amount of time spent viewing specific listings
- A complete history of product reviews left by the user
- The shopper’s entire search history over time
- Items that were previously left in the shopping cart
This development is bad news for sellers using blackhat tactics to manipulate rankings. The era of trying to scam the Amazon algorithm with tricks like extra-long, keyword-stuffed titles is over.
Consequently, Rufus will prioritize genuinely great products over those with superficial optimization. The AI is designed to elevate the best options for customers, effectively making traditional search optimization obsolete.
This change signals a broader platform evolution from an algorithm-centric model to a customer journey focus. Success is no longer about technical tricks but about the total quality of the brand experience.
To compete in this new environment, brands must invest in a holistic approach to their presentation. Elder’s recommendations echo Pope’s advice.
- Design beautiful A+ content that tells a compelling story.
- Invest in premium product packaging that stands out.
- Engage with all customer questions and communications promptly.
- Continuously innovate products based on customer feedback.
- Implement stricter quality assurance with your factory.
- Incorporate testimonials and a personal founder story into brand assets.
The future on Amazon has no room for shortcuts or lazy brand owners. The brands that commit to the hard work of building a superior customer experience will be the ones that thrive.
Rufus’ Shopping Memory Raises the Stakes for Sellers
Kiri Masters wrote in an article on Retail Media Breakfast Club that the new “memory” capability is not a simple feature update. It transforms Rufus from a search tool into an AI that builds a persistent, long-term relationship with each shopper.
This new system is a significant leap beyond the personalization Amazon has used for years. The differences highlight a move from short-term session data to long-term conversational understanding.
- Recommendation Triggers – Move from session-based searches to a longitudinal understanding of a shopper’s goals, such as training for a marathon over six months.
- Follow-up Logic – Shift from simple purchase-triggered reminders to remembering persistent preferences, like a request for plastic-free packaging.
- Recommendation Method – Evolve from “customers also bought” suggestions to intelligent cross-category recommendations, like offering toddler snacks to a buyer of organic baby food.
- Context Duration – Extend from a short-term, frequently reset context to conversational continuity that lasts for weeks or even months.
This update shows Amazon is building what many thought was impossible: a retailer-specific AI that could become a consumer’s primary shopping companion. The system leverages deep knowledge of a user’s habits, from their brand loyalties to their family’s needs.
This development is a powerful demonstration of Amazon’s immense data advantage. For sellers, it should serve as a clear signal of the platform’s increasing control over the customer relationship and product discovery process.
Relying solely on a platform that is building such a proprietary and influential gatekeeper creates significant business risk. This underscores the strategic importance of building assets and customer relationships that your brand owns directly.
Therefore, while adapting to Rufus is essential for competing on Amazon, this evolution should remind sellers to be vigilant. A truly resilient marketing plan must now include diversifying to a Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) website to secure your own customer data and future.
Mikael Brakker, L’Oréal Luxe E-Commerce & Amazon Director"Contextual AI shifts Amazon from a marketplace with recommendations into a shopping brain that curates, recalls, and predicts."
