The Compounding Catalog: Optimize Listings for Better Ranking, Ad Efficiency, and AI Shopping

Paul Sonneveld
Hi, everyone, and welcome to Marketplace Masters. I'm Paul Sonneveld, and today's episode is landing at a pretty remarkable moment. Ten days ago, Amazon did something it has never done before. It started rewriting brands' product titles with its own AI. Titles got to seventy-five characters, a brand new item highlights field and a fourteen-day window to approve the changes before they went live on their own. But here's the thing. The deadline is really just a visible tip of a much bigger shift. Shoppers are asking full questions now, not just typing two keywords. And AI services like Alexa for shopping are answering those questions straight off your listing. 

The listing isn't a box you tick before the real advertising work anymore. It's the foundation the whole funnel sits on. Now, there is nobody better to unpack this topic than Alasdair McLean-Foreman, one of Amazon's earliest third-party sellers back in two thousand and two. And today, the founder and CEO of Tika Metrics, whose team has spent the past six months building for this exact moment. Alastair, great to have you on the show today. Welcome to Marketplace Masters. 

Alasdair McLean-Foreman
Thank you so much, Paul. I am thrilled to be here. I really appreciate the opportunity, and excited for the content and excited to talk about this really important topic. 

Paul Sonneveld
Fantastic. Now, before we jump into it, just a reminder to our audience that this show is a live show. Now, no issue with watching it on demand after, but if you are watching us live, don't hesitate to throw in your questions. I will do my best to put them to Alisdair through the course of the show, and we can make this as interactive as possible. Okay, well, let's get started. Let's get into the conversation. Let's just start in terms of the moment we are in right now, right? The July twenty-seventh deadline has just passed. What are you actually seeing across the accounts, you know, ten days in? Has Amazon's AI rewrites actually started landing? And, you know, to what extent do they align with your predictions? 

Alasdair McLean-Foreman
Yes, well, it's an interesting situation. If you think about the timeline that Amazon gave, it was a pretty tight timeframe. We've seen this before with things like FBA fees, changes in FBA policy. And so for those of you that are familiar with Amazon, I'm sure it's not a huge surprise that Amazon's changed some of the rules. But sort of the ambiguity, I think, is what was the biggest concern. What would exactly happen on July 27th? And so what we have seen is the listings, the titles, and the new item highlights have been updated.

And if you go and take a look at some of the feedback in the Seller Central forums, or if you're talking to our customers, which we spend a lot of time with, it is a mixed bag. And I would say it's pretty concerning for a lot of sellers. Actually, if you go and Google this topic, you'll see in the Seller Central forums some folks that have reported a drop in sales, which is concerning. I think it's really going to depend on the size and characteristics of your listings prior. 

And so the early read would be, it really depends on what you had up before. We've seen some sellers that have actually had their brand name stripped out of the titles, which is obviously very concerning. And so I'd say in general, it's not great. It's sort of proving that Amazon is going to automate this, and they're going to do it in an algorithm that's kind of a bit more cookie-cutter across the whole platform. And so those listings have started to change over the last ten days. That's the early read. 

Paul Sonneveld
So, you know, I appreciate there may be some people tuning in now that have just returned from summer holidays, and they're like, what's been happening? What's been going on? Maybe just take us a step back and walk us through what exactly changed on July 27th. Yeah. And so you mentioned seventy-five. Yeah. Unpack it for us. 

Alasdair McLean-Foreman
Yeah. Yeah, and I've got a couple of visual guides, Paul, I think that would be helpful if you're okay with me sort of pulling some stuff up to cover that. And so, yes, starting July 27th 2026, titles in every category except media must be seventy-five characters or less. Prior to that, it was up to two hundred and fifty characters. And I think what was very important about the scale of the two hundred and fifty characters before, there was a lot of work done across the board, almost an industry born around the optimisation of those pages. So it is a pretty big deal. 

And what Amazon's done is they've said, look, that two-hundred-and-fifty-character limit goes down to seventy-five. But then we're going to give you another hundred and twenty-five characters in an entirely new field called Item Highlights. And so if you can think of that, two hundred to two hundred and fifty getting broken out into two hundred across seventy-five and one twenty-five. And actually, to answer your earlier question again, what we've seen is the inconsistency of how those have been broken up by Amazon's AI. So I think that sort of summarises the actual practical change and the requirements. 

Paul Sonneveld
Now, I know you're... Your thesis is actually this could be much bigger than just titles, right? It's a top-down move by Amazon towards agentic commerce. You know, Rufus became Alexa shopping almost overnight, and then his deadline appeared weeks later. Help us connect those dots. You know, what is what is Amazon really doing here? What are they racing towards? And you know, why now? 

Alasdair McLean-Foreman
Yeah, and it's a great, great point. And it's bigger than the titles. This is really a move by Amazon to start to prepare for the new future of e-commerce, and Amazon.com having a lot of influence with Alexa for Shopping, which was formerly known as Rufus. And I think the precedent here is what we've seen in Google. Me, personally, I spend a lot of time searching like everyone else does, and Google has historically been my go-to. I'm switching more to ChatGPT and Claude these days. But on the Google side, it's interesting because you start to see more AI mode. Paul, what about you? When you Google, do you use that sort of AI mode on the Google side? I'm just sort of curious as a consumer. Because I think that strategy from Amazon is kind of consistent with what we're seeing. What are your thoughts around that? 

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, well, I mean, personally, I only still use Google search just on the, maybe when I'm on the mobile, I'm just on the go, quick answer, you know, and I don't know what setting I've been able, but I'm getting a lot of AI kind of rewritten answers there. But yeah, most of the time I'm just looking for stuff in Claude, right? And I'm not just looking for like results. I'm just looking for full answers to my, whatever, you know, things that I want to know. 

Alasdair McLean-Foreman
That’s right. Me too. And my point is, what Amazon's doing, because it's sort of really the foundation has been keyword search, it's structuring things really rapidly towards the new future to get ready for the equivalent of the Google AI mode. In Amazon's case, that's Alexa for shopping. In order to do that, it's got to get better structured data. It's got to get more information around what actually is the right characteristics, what is the right structure to be able to be answered in those questions.

And so we are very much seeing a lot more of the volume of search to listings for our customers coming through Alexa for Shopping. This is just only going to accelerate. So this is Amazon moving very, very quickly in this direction. And it's all about getting more machine-readable content for its AI algorithm for Alexa for shopping, not just a typical Amazon shifting of the goalposts or changing criteria. This is very, very intentional. 

Paul Sonneveld
And I think in some of our earlier conversations, you made the point around AI can't invent content that doesn't exist. If six hours of battery life isn't in your attributes, no AI rewrite is going to put it there. What does that mean in practice for brands with really thin content across ASINs? I'm thinking about some of those categories with really large catalogues, long tails. That's quite a challenge.

Alasdair McLean-Foreman
Yes, I mean, look, I think you, as a brand operator, whether you're a founder of a brand or operating a brand, you've got to be thinking several steps ahead. And I think you should start with thinking through the fact that the discovery surfaces are multiplying. You've got your standard search, sponsored products, and now Alexa for shopping. And so you've got to play several steps ahead because that's the future. And because of that, the nature of search is changing. And this is a good example here where it used to be the real estate of, for example, best wireless earbuds, two or three words, broad, the shopper does the filtering. You can obviously run sponsored products. That's the lion's share of Amazon's ads business today. 

But if we're moving into the future, you're going to want to think about, especially if you're a differentiated brand and you've got functionality, in this case, wireless earbuds that stay in during running and have at least six hours of battery, that information would want to be in that new field, the hundred and twenty five character field that's called the item highlights. That's what Amazon Alexa for Shopping is going to start to index. And the impact is really important because that's the way that consumers are searching for content with Alexa for Shopping or, in that matter, what you're doing on ChatGPT or Claude or on Google, the AI mode. And so this is all about shifting and kind of creating more of a conversational search framework and getting that content ready for that. 

Paul Sonneveld
So with these new fields, these item highlights, brands are going to have to decide what I put in the title, what I put in the highlight field. And this is a great example there. What guidance would you give? What framework would you give, you know, brands and sellers and how they think about that? Like, you know, should you be repeating things or should they be mutually exclusive? You know, what, what rules of thumb would be useful here? 

Alasdair McLean-Foreman
Yeah, so from the guidance that Amazon's provided publicly and the research we've done and the work that we've done with our brands and Amazon, and we've worked very rapidly with the Amazon API team to develop and build a product that's compatible with the new API fields, you're wanting to start to think about the separation between title and use case and other valuable attributes that go into those item highlight fields. 

And so what's really important is thinking through what your core selling characteristics are. What we've seen is brands have typically pulled those from a central catalogue system or a PIM, and they put them in the item descriptions. What we're now seeing, because of these new field changes and the importance of it is putting those use cases into those item highlights fields. And that's a really, really important part of how this is going to be changing. 

And so just to go back to this example here, I think as a brand operator, my advice here would be really focus on indexing that content instead of thinking about search only and sponsored ads only. Thinking about the content and use cases. Alexa for Shopping is thinking about use cases and thinking about the key attributes. And if you can index those separately and use them in those item highlights field, that's the recommended best practice, which makes, I think, a lot of sense. You've got title to differentiate the name, and then you've got item highlights to differentiate the use case and key attributes. 

Paul Sonneveld
That makes sense. It sort of brings us to the flywheel, right? The better ads produce better listings, produce better ads. How does that mechanism actually work? Where does the loop start for a brand that's kind of behind there? I'm just really curious about how this all links to your advertising strategy and how does that factor in? 

Alasdair McLean-Foreman
Yes, well, we're very excited about this whole aspect. As a company, taking metrics was one of the first ads optimisation tools back in twenty seventeen was when we first got going. And so we've been doing this nearly for ten years and sponsored searches continues to be the largest driver of optimisation. But with this new frontier, what we've actually really enjoyed innovating around is the fact that we're taking some of the search signals that we've built around advertising, and we've actually used those to improve the content. And that relates to that flywheel that you're talking about, Paul, which is better listings, better ads, better listings. 

And so when we did the product research at Teikametrics and we spent a lot of time with some of the best brand operators and some of the really skilled folks that were ahead of the curve, what we found them doing is potentially pulling search data, market share data from tools like Jungle Scout, Helium10, or Stackline, taking the advertising search query reports, taking the other market share data reports that are available from Amazon or other marketplaces, and actually using AI, tools like Claude, tools like ChatGPT, to actually rewrite the content. 

And so what we're doing, and I think what the most sophisticated sellers are doing, is they're actually using their ads data to improve content. And it makes a lot of sense intuitively because the keywords that you're bidding on for ads are some of those really key driving demand signals. And so it's this really exciting cycle that we've been developing software around. And the results have been really fantastic because if you're doing that, you've got better organic lift, you've got the Alexa for shopping piece, but you've also then got improved ROAS. 

And I think if there's anything that's positive, if you think through this idea that Amazon told us to do this very rapidly and they control the game, it's really pushing brands to enhance their content, which I think is going to definitely enhance their return on ad spend. And in many cases, the general mindset was set it and forget it. And so i think i think things are you know, becoming more tight between ads and content which is really exciting for us as a company and our customers. 

Paul Sonneveld
I mean that's I'm thinking through the implications of that I mean, agencies and you know we work with a lot of agencies, and they often run like content and advertising teams just you know, completely separate teams a bit like how Amazon runs the world i guess. um 

Alasdair McLean-Foreman
Yes. 

Paul Sonneveld
Separate P&L's and I can't help but think that things are going to get lost when they're quite disconnected, especially around this content, I guess, moving more and more to the forefront again. 

Alasdair McLean-Foreman
Definitely. 

Paul Sonneveld
What advice would you have for agency leaders? How do they rally their organisations around content? 

Alasdair McLean-Foreman
Yeah, I mean, like... Yeah, look, you know, it is the new frontier. It is the biggest signal that agentic tools, Amazon, likes for shopping on the Amazon side, Sparky on the Walmart side. You know, we've got a whole load of innovation and research that we're doing around ChatGPT. All of this leads back to structured machine-readable content needing to be at the forefront. And so I think all of the top performing brands, the winning brands, the teams that are going to have the best focus are thinking about content.

Firstly, around the text content, and actually already starting to think about image optimisation and on the TikTok side, which we're doing a lot of work on, how do we use AI to enhance different types of creative content, either scripts for creators or even avatars that are a combination of AI and human-created content or completely AI content. So my advice would be to absolutely break down those silos. Absolutely invest in this over the next six to twelve months. It is going to be the future.

But I think combining it with the advertising is really important. And on the diagram that we pulled up here, just emphasising what I spoke of just a minute ago, which is using those marketplace and ad signals, search reports. In our case, we built this all in the product. that we've optimised for our customers using. But you can start to think about the same teams that have got such a proficiency in keyword ad optimisation, I think, are in a really good position to improve and enhance the content and then create that flywheel.

Paul Sonneveld
I would love to quiz you on some numbers in terms of what you were seeing, actually. But before we go there, you mentioned TikTok Shop, and it just created curiosity on my side in terms of, we've been talking about Amazon here, but is this an Amazon-only story? I mean, are you seeing kind of other platforms and thinking about Walmart, TikTok Shop, obviously, there's a whole range of other kind of e-commerce and marketplace channels. Taking a step back, what are you seeing in the non-Amazon spaces? 

Alasdair McLean-Foreman
Yeah, so I think Walmart is a really clear analogy for Amazon Marketplace and the Walmart Marketplace team. The Walmart Marketplace architecture is very, very closely aligned to the best practices on the Amazon side. Very small in comparison. Lots of challenges, you know, sort of reminds me, you know, back to, you know, me selling on Amazon back in two thousand two in my college dorm room and sort of thinking about some of the issues with Seller Central on the Amazon side and on Walmart, they have Seller Center and I think Walmart's playing catch-up on the marketplace side, But in general, you've got the same concepts, the same listings, the same aspects. You've got Sparky, which is their equivalent of Alexa for shopping. 

And I think what we're seeing on the Walmart side is there's a really high return for brands that are willing to get ahead of the curve. Walmart is growing rapidly as a channel, so I highly advise that brands that may have even sort of set their foot in Walmart three or four years ago or even two years ago and it didn't really deliver the returns that were compelling, I would say that that's changing pretty significantly. But it does look similar to Amazon, which is a good thing from an operational standpoint. 

I think on the TikTok shop side, it is so different to the playbook of Amazon or Walmart. The biggest variable is TikTok is not a dedicated e-commerce consumer platform. And so everything is about discovery, and everything is about creators and content. And so the biggest lever on the TikTok side is really around creators and content in that context. And so what we've been doing is building AI tools to help create the right scripts, create and select the right creators. And so it's less about the TikTok shop content. Most of the brands that we're working with are able to ultimately create the TikTok shop listings pretty quickly. 

If you're on the Shopify side, it's very turnkey. You can literally just pull in your content from Shopify straight in, which is very common for especially DTC brands. And so to answer your question, it's not quite the listing optimisation on the TikTok side that's the issue. It's the how do I find my creators? What are those creators are going to create? And so it's almost like taking that content game to the next level. And I think it's very challenging for brands that have got a successful playbook on Amazon to necessarily translate. And I think everyone's learning pretty quickly, but it's definitely not the same playbook. And even on this topic, it's less about the listings you've got on TikTok. It's more about who are your creators? What's the video content? 

Paul Sonneveld
Quite a different ballgame, almost worth a separate episode, I'd suggest. 

Alasdair McLean-Foreman
Yes, yes. 

Paul Sonneveld
Just to touch back on Amazon, I know, I mean, it's great. You guys have been really at the forefront of this, working very closely with Amazon and some of your great new product features. I'd love to just hear about some of those case studies. I mean, just to get our audience excited in terms of really optimising their content in a new way, running ads, getting that whole flywheel going that you sort of spoke about before. I mean, what are you actually seeing in terms of numbers and results? 

Alasdair McLean-Foreman
Yeah, so look, I think it's important, you know, this is less about our company, and it's more about a shift in the industry towards the agentic commerce side of things. We are very excited though. What we've done on the product team is we've actually sort of almost invented a new technology because of this, and our product team, as we were talking to the to a lot of the brands that were taking the content from their ads, really creating the right prompts. 

We actually met with a lot of brand owners that were using ChatGPT or Claude. And what we found is Claude can do a decent job, but it doesn't have the context of your channel. And it led us to create something that we think is really interesting. And we filed seven patents around it. And you can think of it as what we're calling an orchestration layer. And think of this as, if you give ChatGPT to someone who's just not experienced using ChatGPT, and then you give it to someone that's really sort of experimented with lots of different prompts, it's all about what do you prompt the AI. 

And so what we've been able to do is sort of take a lot of the data and the machine learning that we've got for ads and then create better prompts for an interface. And the results are really awesome. So we've called this ARI Catalogue. The whole patented platform is under a trademark that we've developed called artificial retail intelligence. And it's all about being very verticalized and contextual. And so what we've done is been able to build software that actually rewrites all of your listings, keeps your keywords, the most important keywords, and it actually indexes them based off the value.

And we're picking up that value from the ads. And we can deploy this across a catalogue of any size and go and output the right seventy-five characters and one twenty-five item highlights. The really cool part though, is that it continues to learn. And as an example, we're able to not do A-B testing. We're able to do a better thing, which is constantly look for changes. And if we see a level of confidence to say, we should make a change, the user in our app gets a prompt, says, we think, Paul, that you should run another optimisation. 

And to answer your question on the results, we've seen really, really significant increases in conversion rate, ROAS. In certain customers, we've seen really large lifts in total sales. I think to pick I want to be careful here as well because of just the importance of integrity of this type of data, and we're really focused on that as a business. There isn't going to be one metric that we could quote, or anyone could quote to say, look, changing your content is going to lift your performance by twenty five percent. It really comes back to where are you now? 

And what we found is when we've looked at brands that have had long tail catalogues, and most brand operators are focused on the 80-20 rule, and they're really good at sort of the twenty percent of their best listings. But when you actually re-update and you re-index the long tail of your listings, we've seen a huge impact. And so it would be very situational. 

I think the biggest opportunity here is if you've got a large catalogue, let's say a thousand SKUs, and you've been really only working on the head of that, and then you go and run some optimisation across the long tail, the dormant SKUs get reactivated. And we've seen results up to, you know, a hundred and thirty five percent increase because what Amazon's doing, what Walmart's doing as well. But we're talking Amazon mainly is just a reward to indexing. And so that's a really important thought process. 

The ROAS has gone up significantly because you're obviously using better signals. And then I think, you know, if we look at the different bands, what's interesting is, you know, the SKUs that you probably didn't think that were performing as well with ROAS when they get re-indexed and we start to see that flywheel effect, those are improving. If people are listening to this and they've got really, really good optimisation and they've maybe only got sort of five products, obviously it's hard to see a huge list. 

So I want to be careful about, especially on a call like this with the MerchantSpring community, saying that we've got something that can, you know, ten x or anyone can say that. But I think it's more about the long tail optimisation. This is a forcing function now with July 27th, and going back to those comments, and for folks that are listening, you can go and read some of the negatives actually in the Seller Central forums. It was really interesting to me to see people saying they saw the opposite. When Amazon re-indexed their listings, they've seen a drop. So I think that also really highlights the importance of getting this right. 

Paul Sonneveld
I mean, it's fascinating. But actually, what you're saying, it absolutely makes sense where you're going to see most of the benefit in a long tail and that catalogue where, you know, if you're doing this in a human-powered way, you're just never going to get there, right? You're always going to do the Pareto 80-20, and you always focus on that top list of SKUs, you just never get to the long tail. So, yeah. It makes a lot of sense to me as I'm hearing you talk. And I think there's some great results there. But yeah, obviously, with the caveat that if you're just an FBA seller selling three products, you've probably invested hundreds of hours in optimising those listings. So therefore, the benefit is going to be a little bit less. Absolutely. 

So we are out of time, unfortunately, Alisdair. But maybe just to close us out. Maybe talk to us about how you see the road ahead in terms of content and maybe the interplay of content and advertising. What are your predictions for the future? And it's a bit of a dangerous game in the world we live in these days, but maybe in the next six months, twelve months, what are you thinking about maybe? And more importantly, what's your product team thinking about in terms of features and how to better serve your customers? 

Alasdair McLean-Foreman
Look, I think this change on July 27th from Amazon, it's a huge deal. And that's why I reference what Google has done. Right. And this is a massive deal. I mean, Amazon's ads business is, you know, approaching eighty billion of annual revenue in the US. Right. And, you know, from a global number, eighty billion US dollars. And there. So ambitious in the sense that they don't want to lose any ground to ChatGPT or any other platform that's going to switch to agentic, that they've gone and mandated these listing changes for July twenty-seventh. And they've done that knowingly that if people are on Alexa for shopping, it's going to in a way, cannibalise their sponsored products. In the same way, Google has seen, you know, ultimately every time you run an AI mode search on Google, you're not paying for the typical, formerly known as AdWords, Google Ads. 

And so I think that's a really big precedent to what's happening. And I predict that Amazon, on the consumer side, is going to push more and more consumer searches into Alexa for shopping. And if that's the case, the brand operators, those of you that are operating brands, listening to this are going to need to get really ahead of that. And even if you think about this holiday, this Q4, we're going to see more sales coming from Alexa for shopping or Walmart Sparky or ChatGPT than ever before. 

And so that's the roadmap that we recommend operating on. I also think on other surfaces and as things evolved, images are going to be really important. And images are something that we're really excited about because the AI models to create images are just only just there to be able to create an image that's of good enough quality to actually be presented for a brand in front of a consumer. And I think the economics of being able to change your images instead of running an expensive photo shoot, those types of things are going to really change the game. 

And so I think you've got to be putting content up right where advertising is, and that's the next three years. And then I think testing new channels like TikTok Shop that we talked about, ChatGPT is going to be interesting to see the relationship there between the dot-com side and who's going to fulfill the inventory. Amazon is still going to be the most dominant. And I think that they're bold and they want to continue to own, they want to own consumer e-commerce. And that's really what this July twenty-seventh shift is all about. 

Paul Sonneveld
That's a great summary. Great to close us out like that, Alisdair. Really, I'm sorry we've run out of time here, but I think... 

Alasdair McLean-Foreman
No problem. It's been an absolute pleasure. 

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Thank you so much. Before we say goodbye, I'm sure there are brands listening now or maybe watching this later that like... It's really interesting, you know, the ARI product that you guys talked about, and particularly the benefits, particularly for brands that have got that really long tail catalogue. That sounds really interesting. I mean, what's the best way to continue the conversation with yourselves or your team?

Alasdair McLean-Foreman
Yeah, no, thank you so much, Paul. Well, look, we're really excited about the technology. And one of the biggest parts of the way that we interact with brands is that we're able to actually set up demos. We're actually able to set up audits at no cost. And for anyone listening who's interested in experiencing ARI and seeing the impact or fixing these issues that we've talked about, the July listing changes, you can visit our website, teikametrics.com, and you'll see a request a demo link. 

And if you fill that out, one of our team will get in touch, and we can actually simulate and help you at no cost, take a look and see what the current listing score is. We can actually score the listings. We can simulate the different changes, including the item highlights. And would love to talk to you. So that's the easiest way to take the next step. Obviously, you can look me up on LinkedIn and be happy to chat directly as well. So, Paul, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for the opportunity. 

Paul Sonneveld
Thank you, Alisdair. Have a wonderful day, and until next time. 

Alasdair McLean-Foreman
Thanks. Take care. Bye. 

Paul Sonneveld
All right, everyone, that is the end of today's live episode. Just a few quick reminders before we wrap up. This session is, was recorded, and anyone who is registered will get a replay in their inbox, forwarded to your content, retail media teams, and especially anyone working through some of Amazon's title rewrites at the moment. 

And if you want to go deeper in terms of what Alisdair showed today, as he mentioned, you'll find Teikatmetrics at teikatmetrics.com. And Alistair is on LinkedIn as well. So make sure to look him up. That's it for today. Hope you're enjoying a great summer if you're based in the Northern Hemisphere. And I look forward to catching up with you next week when we're going to talk about Amazon Vendor and how you run the perfect hybrid strategy across your vendor and seller accounts. Till then, take care.