Kuldeep Paul

Shopping assistant · Amazon

Amazon Rufus (retired)

Amazon catalogue, reviews and Q&A, plus web content fetched by Amazonbot and Amzn-SearchBot. Retired in May 2026 in favour of an Alexa shopping agent.

Compiled by · Updated Oct 29, 2026

Operator
Amazon
Launched
Feb 1, 2024
Search index
Amazon catalogue, reviews and Q&A, plus web content fetched by Amazonbot and Amzn-SearchBot. Retired in May 2026 in favour of an Alexa shopping agent.Sources: modernretail.co, developer.amazon.com
Crawlers
Amazonbot — blocked by 14.9% of top sitesAmzn-SearchBot — blocked by 5.6% of top sitesAmzn-User — blocked by 5.7% of top sites
Referrer in analytics
No referrer (traffic arrives as direct or via the host site)
UTM tagging
None added
Ads
Sponsored product suggestions appeared inside Rufus answers.
Citations
Product cards inside Amazon.
Official docs
developer.amazon.com

What this means for visibility

Amazon reported 300M+ customers used Rufus in 2025 before retiring it.

Usage, as stated

As ofMetricValueStated bySource
Dec 2025Customers who used Rufus300 million+Amazonstackline.com

Questions

What search engine does Amazon Rufus (retired) use?

Amazon catalogue, reviews and Q&A, plus web content fetched by Amazonbot and Amzn-SearchBot. Retired in May 2026 in favour of an Alexa shopping agent.

Which crawlers does Amazon Rufus (retired) use?

Amazon Rufus (retired) relies on Amazonbot, Amzn-SearchBot, Amzn-User. Amazon reported 300M+ customers used Rufus in 2025 before retiring it.

How do I track Amazon Rufus (retired) traffic in analytics?

Amazon Rufus (retired) does not send its own referrer, so its clicks can't be separated from the host site's traffic.

Does Amazon Rufus (retired) show ads?

Sponsored product suggestions appeared inside Rufus answers.

Analysis using this data

  1. The opt-out asymmetry: you can block the small AI engines, not the big oneThe AI surfaces with the most users are the ones publishers can't refuse and can't measure.

Other AI engines

ChatGPT · ChatGPT Atlas · Google AI Overviews · Google AI Mode · Gemini · Perplexity · Comet · Claude · Microsoft Copilot · Meta AI · Grok · DeepSeek · Le Chat · You.com · Brave Search (Ask Brave) · Kagi Assistant · DuckDuckGo (Duck.ai & Search Assist)

How to cite this data

This dataset is free to use, including commercially, under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. The one rule is attribution:

  1. Credit the source as “Kuldeep Paul, kuldeep.cc” wherever you use a figure, chart or table from it.
  2. Link to this page (https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/amazon-rufus), not to the download file, so readers can check the source of every number.
  3. Include the date. These figures change; say “as of Oct 29, 2026” or link to the version you used.
  4. Mark changes. If you filter, recalculate or chart the data yourself, say so (“analysis based on data from…”).
  5. Cite the original source for single figures when you quote one reported number; it is linked in every row.

In running text: according to Kuldeep Paul's Amazon Rufus (retired) — AI search engine reference (kuldeep.cc). More in the methodology.

APA

Paul, K. (2026). Amazon Rufus (retired) — AI search engine reference [Data set]. kuldeep.cc. https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/amazon-rufus

MLA

Paul, Kuldeep. "Amazon Rufus (retired) — AI search engine reference." kuldeep.cc, 29 October 2026, https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/amazon-rufus.

Chicago

Paul, Kuldeep. 2026. "Amazon Rufus (retired) — AI search engine reference." Dataset. kuldeep.cc. Updated Oct 29, 2026. https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/amazon-rufus.

BibTeX

@misc{paul2026amazonrufus, author = {Paul, Kuldeep}, title = {Amazon Rufus (retired) — AI search engine reference}, year = {2026}, howpublished = {\url{https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/amazon-rufus}}, note = {Dataset, CC BY 4.0, updated 2026-10-29} }

HTML link

<a href="https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/amazon-rufus">Amazon Rufus (retired) — AI search engine reference</a> (data: Kuldeep Paul, kuldeep.cc)