Amazon ranking factors: sorted by what Amazon actually says

Ranking factors are the signals that decide where a product appears when a shopper searches on Amazon. Amazon's search glossary calls that position the place an ASIN holds in the featured shopping results, featured being Amazon's default sort. It also says the product discovery and shopping landscape is subject to continuous experimentation.

Amazon does not publish its ranking formula, and it does not name factor weights. Names like A9 and A10 and splits such as a share of weight for conversion rate come from sellers and agencies, not from Amazon's help pages. That does not make every claim wrong, but it means each one should be treated as a hypothesis until you have tested it on your own products.

Before any factor can move a product up, the product has to be searchable. Amazon's help lists the common reasons an ASIN is not. Parent ASINs are never searchable by design; you check a child ASIN instead.

An ASIN without a browse node is not indexed, and Amazon compares a browse node to a shelf in a supermarket: the product needs to be on a specific, relevant one. An ASIN marked index suppressed is hidden from search until you fix the listing.

Changes are not instant either. Amazon says it can take up to 72 hours for changes to new or existing ASINs to go live, so judge a fix after three days, not three hours.

Relevance is the best documented group. Amazon's discoverability help says relevant and complete product information increases discoverability, which could lead to increased sales, and its seller blog walks through the fields: the product title for primary keywords, bullet points and description for features and secondary keywords, back-end search terms for synonyms and variations, and item type keyword for classification.

Amazon adds a caveat that matters: it reserves the right not to use all supplied content for retrieving products in search, for reasons including search efficiency, potential manipulation, irrelevant terms and offensive terms. More keywords are not always more reach. Amazon's blog puts it plainly: keyword stuffing can create a poor customer experience and hurt your rankings.

Amazon names a few levers beyond text. Its seller blog says you can tweak photos and adjust price points to organically move up in search results and generate more sales, and lists product images and price among its seven ways to improve search rankings. It says cost per click ads like Sponsored Products can help offers rise through search results.

Amazon Ads goes one step further for video: its new product playbook recommends single product Sponsored Brands video ads that send traffic to the detail page, increasing visibility and glance views to help boost organic rankings. It does not say how much, or how the effect works, so treat it as a direction, not a formula.

Whatever the exact weights, the customer signals most guides rank highest are worth improving for their own sake, because they are also what turns a visit into a sale. Click-through rate from search results, conversion rate on the product detail page, customer reviews and ratings, and sales velocity all describe whether shoppers choose your product once they see it.

Amazon's Search Query Performance dashboard shows the first steps of that funnel for your brand: impressions, clicks, cart adds and purchases by search query.

These signals move together. A clearer main image lifts clicks; an accurate, complete product listing lifts conversions and cuts returns; positive reviews make the next shopper more confident. Competitive pricing helps on two fronts: Amazon names price as a search lever, and price is one of the things that decides which offer is featured on a shared listing, which is a separate choice from search rank.

Because the weights are unpublished, the useful question is not what the algorithm rewards in general but what moves your products. Amazon gives brands two tools for that. Manage Your Experiments runs A/B tests on titles, images, descriptions and other content in Brand Registry. The Search Query Performance dashboard shows impressions, clicks, cart adds and purchases for the searches that lead shoppers to your brand.