A note from our CEO

Hi everyone,

I’ve had a couple weeks to reflect on Prime Day - unusually moved to June and noticeably less promoted than usual. Here are my takeaways from the event:

1. I think the best takeaway was something Jon Derkitz posted: Amazon hasn’t done a press release about PD performance this year. Historically, there’s always a PR victory lap. It’s like they took a step back from the event, and that says more to me than anything about how the event was on a relative basis. 

2. Amazon emphasizing Haul (their Temu equivalent - remember Temu?) with CPG was a twist I didn’t see coming and probably contributed to the decrease in AOV and price-per-product. We were surprised to see a lot of our brands featured with Amazon-funded discounts. It’ll be interesting to see if this was a one-off experiment or if they have bigger plans for the channel.

3. Average discount %s were down along with customer sentiment about the deals. If your margins can tolerate a 20%+ discount, that seems to be the sweet spot for attracting the disillusioned deal-seekers.

4. Shoppers gravitated toward the extreme ends of the price spectrum. Numerator shows that ~70% of PD purchases were consumables and household essentials under $20/item, and Adobe shows lifts on high-end big ticket items like electronics, furniture, etc. despite those categories struggling overall. The stuff in the middle mostly got skipped. For premium CPG, is it worth launching some lower price-point sample packs or similar products to grab PD shoppers, or do those shoppers not have the LTV to make it worthwhile? I’ll need to circle back in a few months to answer that one.

5. AI traffic was up ~90% YoY. While a 90% increase from “almost nothing” is still “not very much,” the more interesting stat to me was that traffic from AI sources converted ~40% better than traffic from other channels. It’s probably a good idea to make your content AI friendly. Luckily, there are some things you can do right now to help get your products noticed by LLMs/chatbots. More on this later in the newsletter.

Overall, it was a pretty solid Prime Day for us. Our average lift was slightly lower than usual (most likely due to the lack of external advertising of the event and competing with the World Cup and July 4th), but many of our brands still saw record-breaking sales days during the event.

Hope you all survived (and thrived)!

-Chris

In this newsletter:

• Sales and Ad Spend Numbers

• Amazon’s Title Updates - What They Are & How We’re Approaching Them

• AEO/GEO Playbook for CPG Brands

• Search Term Trends

Last Month’s Sales and Ad Spend Numbers

Amazon’s Upcoming Title Updates

What’s changing: Amazon is splitting product titles into two separate fields. The title itself will now be limited to 75 characters, but a new 125-character Item Highlights field has been added. This change is intended to improve the shopping experience by cleaning up the long, keyword-stuffed titles that are currently standard procedure on Amazon.

When: July 27th. Any products not updated to the new format by then will be updated automatically by Amazon’s AI.

What this means in practice: Titles will focus on the brand and the couple most important value props so a shopper can quickly make a decision. The “item highlights” will communicate why a shopper should buy our product by highlighting key benefits, differentiators, and supporting keywords.

Our approach:

New Title format: [Brand] + [Flagship Keyword Phrase] + [Key Identifier] + [Size]

The title should answer:

• Who made the product?

• What is the product?

• Can shoppers identify the product in one second?

• Can they quickly verify they're selecting the correct size?

The Item Highlights field should answer:

• Why should someone buy this product?

  • Key benefits

  • Secondary keywords

  • Top targets

  • Product differentiators

Example:

Title: BrandCo Keto-friendly Cereal Bars - Cinnamon (6 Bars)

Item Highlights: High Protein, Low Carb, Nutritious Grab-n-Go Snack, Nostalgic Cereal Flavor, For Kids & Adults

If important keywords are removed from the title, incorporate them into:

• Bullet points

• Item Highlights

• Premium A+ Content (where appropriate)

• Backend search terms

AEO/GEO Playbook for CPG Brands

For the most part, good AEO/GEO (Answer Engine/Generative Engine Optimization - basically SEO for AI) is nearly identical to good SEO. You need to clearly communicate what your product is for, who would want it, and why. But there are some AI-specific nuances that can be the difference between ChatGPT (or Claude, Gemini, Alexa for Shopping, etc.) recommending your product or a competitor’s. This guide goes over how to make sure your content makes sense to the machines.

Check out the full guide here.

Search Term Trends - July 2026