Amazon Sponsored Products prompts have been billable in the US since March 25, 2026. Every eligible Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaign was enrolled automatically. The copy is written by Amazon’s AI from your detail page, Brand Store and campaign data. There’s no separate bid, clicks are charged at your campaign’s CPC, and the spend is blended into the same campaign ACOS you’ve been grading your agency on all year.
There’s also one detail almost nobody we talk to knows about. According to trade coverage of the rollout, a prompt only shows up in the Ads Console after it has received at least one click. That means the first time you can read a line of ad copy running under your brand is after you’ve already paid for it.
Across the accounts we’ve audited since the spring, the typical pattern looks like this: nobody on the brand side has opened the Prompts tab, nobody at the agency has pulled the Prompts report, and prompt spend has been sitting inside campaign totals for six months. That’s normally a small line. It stops being small in the ten weeks where every click costs more than it did in March.
Here’s what the feature does, what it costs, and the audit we run before Q4.
What Sponsored Products prompts actually are
Amazon introduced prompts as a free open beta at unBoxed on November 11, 2025, and moved them to general availability in the US with billing from March 25, 2026. Per Amazon Ads, prompts are an AI-powered enhancement to existing campaigns that uses “first-party signals from your detail pages, Brand Store, campaign data, and more” to surface product information at decision points.
In practice:
- Placement: prompts can appear in shopping results and on product detail pages.
- Behaviour: clicking a prompt can open a Rufus conversation or answer the shopper directly on the page.
- Enrollment: automatic for eligible SP and SB campaigns. No setup, no opt-in.
- Billing: standard CPC under the parent campaign’s auction. There’s no separate prompt bid and no separate prompt budget.
- Control: individual prompts can be paused under Campaign → Ad Group → Ads → Prompts.
- Reporting: a dedicated report under Reports → Create Report → Sponsored Products → Prompts, with prompt text, associated ad, impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC, spend, sales, ACOS, ROAS and 7-day orders and units.
- Scope: US only. Sellers and vendors are eligible. Authors are excluded.
Amazon stages ad features by account and changes console paths regularly. Check the placement and the tab in your own console rather than trusting any blog post, including this one.
Why prompts are a PPC problem, not just a creative one
Most of the commentary on prompts treats them as a listing-content question: write better bullets and the AI writes better prompts. That’s true. But for whoever owns the ad budget, prompts create three specific problems.
1. The copy is visible only after the spend
In a normal SP ad, the creative is your main image and title. You can see both before a single impression is served. Prompts reverse that. The text is generated, served and clicked before it appears in the console.
For most brands that’s fine most of the time. It’s a problem in the categories where one wrong sentence matters: supplements, baby products, anything with compatibility, anything with a claim that needs substantiation. If a prompt says something your listing doesn’t quite support, you find out from the report after a round of clicks, not from an approval queue beforehand.
2. Prompt spend hides inside campaign ACOS
Because prompts share the campaign’s CPC and budget, their performance is blended into the campaign totals unless someone pulls the Prompts report. A campaign running at 28% ACOS might be a 24% keyword engine carrying a 45% prompt line, or it might be the other way round.
Neither is automatically bad. Prompts may reach shoppers further into the decision and convert well. The point is that nobody knows which it is unless the report gets pulled, and in most accounts it hasn’t been.
3. The budget draw lands in Q4
Prompts draw on the same daily budget as everything else in the campaign. In a quiet month, a few dollars of prompt clicks don’t change delivery. In November, when CPCs run well above their annual average and budget-capped campaigns stop serving mid-afternoon, every dollar spent on a prompt is a dollar that wasn’t available for the exact-match term that pays for the business.
The math on a typical account: take a $200K/month brand spending $30K/month on ads. If prompts are taking 5% of SP spend, that’s about $1,500 a month in March. In November, with spend scaled up for peak and CPCs higher, the same share could easily be $3,000-4,000. That’s not a crisis. It’s a line item that nobody has ever looked at, which is a bad thing to take into a quarter where budget caps decide who’s still serving at 6pm on Black Friday.
We don’t have a benchmark for what share of spend prompts “should” take, and we’d be suspicious of anyone offering one. It depends on category, campaign structure and how much Rufus traffic your products attract. Your own report is the only number that matters.
The Q4 prompts audit: six steps, about 90 minutes
Run this before mid-October, while clicks are still at normal prices and there’s time to act on what you find.
1. Pull the Prompts report for March 25 to today. Save it with the date in the filename. This is your baseline. If you want to compare November against a normal period later, this is the only way you’ll have one.
2. Sort by spend and calculate prompt share. Total prompt spend divided by total SP + SB spend over the same window. Then do the same for prompt sales. If prompts account for a larger share of spend than of sales, they’re running below account efficiency. If it’s the other way round, they may be one of your better placements.
3. Read every prompt with meaningful spend, out loud. This step matters most and gets skipped most. For each one, ask:
- Is every factual statement supported by the listing?
- Does it make a claim that would be a compliance problem if a human wrote it? Health, safety, compatibility, “best,” “clinically,” “guaranteed.”
- Does it send shoppers toward a question your listing answers badly? A prompt that invites “will this fit my…” on a SKU with fit-related returns is buying clicks into your weakest page.
4. Pause on judgment, not just ACOS. Any prompt with a claim you can’t substantiate gets paused regardless of performance. Prompts with high ACOS and low volume get paused too. Prompts converting at or better than campaign average stay on.
5. Fix the source, not just the prompt. Prompts are generated from your detail page and Brand Store. If a prompt overstated something, the listing probably implies it. Correct the bullet, the A+ copy or the attribute. Otherwise, pausing one prompt just leads to the next one being written from the same material.
6. Put the report on a weekly schedule through January. Prompts only appear once they get a click, so new ones show up over time. Checking weekly through peak catches a bad line within days instead of at the January review.
What to decide before the freeze
If you’ve written a Q4 change freeze (and you should have one), prompts need a line in it. Here’s how we set it up:
- Prompt pauses are explicitly NOT frozen. Pausing a prompt is instant and reversible, just like a bid change. Whoever reviews the weekly report needs authority to pause without a meeting.
- Listing edits made to fix prompt source material follow the normal freeze rules. A factual correction is a repair and ships. Rewriting bullets to “optimise for Rufus” three weeks before Cyber Monday is a bet, and it waits until January.
- One named owner. Not “the agency,” and not “whoever’s on PPC this week.” The person who reads the prompt text needs to know what the product can and can’t claim. That’s often a brand-side person, not the campaign manager.
A note on turning prompts off entirely: we don’t recommend it as a default. There’s no reason to assume prompts perform badly. On some accounts they’re among the more efficient lines, because the shopper is already in a question-answering frame of mind. The problem isn’t the feature. It’s that it has been running unread.
What prompts tell you about your listing
The Prompts report is also one of the few places Amazon shows you, in writing, how its AI summarises your product. Read the top 20 prompts by impressions across your catalogue and look for patterns:
- The benefit Amazon leads with. If every prompt for your hero SKU leads with a feature you consider secondary, your detail page is emphasising it more than you think.
- Missing attributes. Prompts built on vague claims (“great quality”) rather than specifics (“BPA-free, 32 oz, dishwasher safe”) usually mean the structured attributes are thin.
- The comparison it invites. Prompts that frame your product against a cheaper alternative suggest the page isn’t communicating tier.
That’s useful whether or not you keep the prompts running.
FAQ
Are Amazon Sponsored Products prompts on by default?
Yes. Eligible SP and SB campaigns in the US were enrolled automatically, and billing began March 25, 2026. You can pause individual prompts in the Ads Console under the Prompts tab in each ad group.
How are prompts billed?
At CPC, through the parent campaign’s auction and budget. There’s no separate prompt bid. Spend and sales roll into campaign totals, and the Prompts report breaks them out.
Can I see prompt text before it runs?
Based on trade coverage of the rollout, prompts only appear in the console once they’ve received a click. In practice, the first review happens after the first spend. That’s why a weekly report during Q4 matters.
Do prompts hurt ACOS?
Not necessarily. Some accounts see prompts convert at or above campaign average. The risk isn’t the feature itself. It’s that prompt performance is blended into campaign ACOS, so nobody knows whether it’s helping or hurting until someone pulls the report.
Should we pause prompts for Q4?
Pause the ones making unsupported claims and the clearly inefficient ones. Keep the ones converting well. Pausing everything by default throws away a placement you haven’t measured. Leaving everything running unread in November is the more expensive mistake.
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Prompts are a good example of how Q4 costs get missed: a default switched on in March, billed inside a number you already track, and read by nobody. If you’re looking for a team that manages every lever — creative, advertising, and operations — Velocity Sellers works with brands doing $100K+/month on Amazon. Contact us for a free account audit.
