Amazon’s AI Shopping Prompts Are Now Billable: What Every Seller Needs to Check Today
If you have active Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands campaigns running in the US right now, Amazon has quietly started charging you for something that was free until last week. No opt-in required. No warning email. Just a new cost line appearing in your campaign data from March 25 onwards.
Here is what happened, why it matters, and what to do about it.
What Are Sponsored Prompts?
Amazon introduced AI-powered prompts for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands at its annual unBoxed conference in November 2025. The feature functions like a virtual product expert sitting inside your ad unit. When a shopper interacts with a sponsored listing, prompts surface contextual product information drawn from your detail page, Brand Store, and campaign data at the moment they are deciding whether to buy.
Think of it as Amazon’s answer to the question shoppers have that your listing copy does not immediately answer. Instead of losing that shopper to a competitor or a Google search, the prompt intercepts that uncertainty and tries to resolve it on the spot.
During beta, this ran for free. Amazon framed the launch around capability, and most coverage focused on what the feature does rather than what it costs. That framing quietly shifted on March 25, 2026, when prompts moved to general availability and CPC billing began.
What Changed on March 25
The billing change is the detail that most advertisers will have missed. The official announcement, published on March 10, led with the feature going live. The cost implication was confirmed but not headlined.
Prompts are now billed under your existing CPC parameters. There is no separate bid to set and no standalone budget to manage. When a shopper clicks on an AI-generated prompt, it draws from the same auction dynamics, bid adjustments, and placement modifiers that govern the rest of your campaign. The cost of that click depends on how your campaigns are configured today.
The second thing worth understanding is that every active Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaign in the US was automatically enrolled. You did not have to switch anything on. If your campaigns were live on March 25, prompts were live with them.
Why This Could Affect Your Numbers
Your pre-March 25 ACOS and ROAS benchmarks may no longer be accurate reference points. If prompt clicks convert at a different rate than standard ad clicks, and you are not tracking them separately, your campaign efficiency metrics will shift without a clear explanation in your standard reporting views.
Amazon does provide prompt-level performance data through two routes. Inside the Ads Console, you can navigate to Campaign, then Ad Group, then Ads, then the Prompts tab to see impressions, clicks, and orders attributed to individual prompts. For a more detailed breakdown, there is also a dedicated downloadable report: go to Reports, select Create report, set the category to Sponsored Products, and choose Prompts as the report type. The catch is that prompts only appear in either view once they have received at least one click, so low-traffic campaigns may look empty even if prompts are running.
For accounts where listing content is thin or out of date, the risk is higher. Prompts are generated automatically from your detail page copy, Brand Store content, and campaign data. If that source material is weak or vague, the prompts Amazon generates from it will be weak or vague too, and you will be paying for clicks driven by content that does not represent your product accurately.
What to Do Now
The first step is finding the Prompts tab. Inside your Ads Console, navigate to the relevant campaign, then into the ad group, then into the Ads section. The Prompts tab sits there. Review what Amazon has auto-generated for your active campaigns.
From there, the process is straightforward. If a prompt accurately represents the product and would genuinely help a shopper make a decision, leave it. If a prompt is vague, inaccurate, or pulling from outdated listing content, pause it. Amazon allows you to manage and pause specific prompts at the individual level without touching the broader campaign.
The second thing this review will tell you is whether your listing content needs updating. Prompts are only as good as what they pull from. If the auto-generated copy looks generic, that is a signal your detail page is due for a refresh regardless of prompts. Think of this as a free content audit delivered by Amazon’s own AI.
Finally, pull the dedicated Prompts report and set a baseline now. Go to Reports, select Create report, set the category to Sponsored Products, and choose Prompts as the report type. You want to know what prompt-attributed clicks and orders look like in the first few weeks while this is new, so you have a reference point for how this affects your account going forward. Early data is much easier to interpret than trying to untangle three months of mixed performance later.
The Broader Pattern
This is not the first time Amazon has moved a feature from free beta to paid GA without making the billing change the centrepiece of the announcement. It fits a pattern of layering AI-powered enhancements on top of existing ad infrastructure, with the cost absorbed into familiar billing mechanics rather than presented as a new fee. That approach keeps the announcement positive and the feature adoption high. It also means advertisers who are not reading release notes closely will only notice something changed when their numbers do.
The feature itself is genuinely useful when the underlying content is solid. A well-generated prompt that resolves a shopper’s key objection at the right moment can drive a conversion that would not have happened otherwise. The issue is not the feature. The issue is that it went live on every campaign automatically, it is now costing money, and most sellers have not looked at it yet.
Check your Prompts tab today.
