Amazon says outside AI shopping assistants send it very little traffic

Amazon's chief executive, Andy Jassy, says AI shopping assistants built by other companies send Amazon only a small slice of its referral traffic. Referral traffic means visitors who arrive by clicking over from another site or app. So far, these outside tools are not a major source of Amazon shoppers.

What Amazon's own tool shows

The report on Jassy's comments says people who use Amazon's own assistant, Alexa for Shopping, buy more often than other shoppers. They also spend more per order. That points to a gap between AI help offered inside Amazon and AI help offered elsewhere.

An AI shopping agent is a tool that searches for products, compares them and suggests what to buy, so you do less of the browsing yourself.

Why it matters for sellers

If you sell online, the main point is that AI shopping tools are not yet a big source of buyers, at least on Amazon. Moving your ad budget on hype alone is hard to justify. Watch where your own customers actually come from before you change spending.

What is not known

• How small the "sliver" of traffic is, in numbers or percentages.
• Which outside AI tools Jassy was referring to.
• How much more often or how much more per order Alexa for Shopping users buy.
• Whether outside AI traffic will grow in the future.

The material available gives no figures for any of these, so the size of the gap remains unclear.