Amazon has a plan to index the world’s online shopping data

Amazon has plans to build a vault of data on every product sold anywhere on the internet, even products Amazon doesn’t sell, and make the information available through its own site, according to Reuters. The project, called the “World Product Graph,” is meant to make it less likely that shoppers leave Amazon to do their product research on Reddit or Google, and make it more likely shoppers end up at Amazon even if they’re searching for a product sold elsewhere. The same goes for AI agents — if Amazon has the largest stockpile of shopping data, AI agents may rely on its index of products over others, so even people shopping with bots will end up on its pages.

Links to outside retailers’ products have already started popping up on Amazon through the “shop direct” feature it launched last year. The company also has its own AI shopping assistant, Alexa for Shopping, previously called Rufus. The World Product Graph project would also be aimed at fixing issues with the AI by providing it more data. According to Reuters, an internal Amazon document on the project says “Many Rufus answers are factually wrong or incomplete” and running users’ Amazon searches with the AI is expensive. Adding more data is reportedly supposed to make the system more accurate and able to use cheaper models.

Whether this actually ships is still up in the air. The internal document reportedly says the project “depends on discovering how brands organize their products on their own websites,” which could involve Amazon crawling other retailers’ sites. Reuters says it’s unclear “if or when this plan may be implemented,” but said the document on it included an October 1st, 2027 release date.