Amazon Review Requests and Branded Conversations: what brands get

Amazon Ads will now sell you an ad whose only job is to ask your own customers for a review. It's called Review Requests, it was announced on September 29, 2026, and it's aimed at products with fewer than 1,000 ratings and reviews.

The pitch is speed. Amazon says products in its test "received three times as many ratings and reviews per week compared to before the test." For a new launch stuck at a few dozen reviews, that can be the difference between a detail page that converts and one that doesn't.

Amazon announced it alongside Branded Conversations, which lets brands sponsor a conversation inside Alexa for Shopping from January 2027. Both formats are about the same shift: more of the path to purchase is now owned and priced by Amazon.

How Review Requests works#

Amazon's launch page describes it as an "advertising solution [that] reaches customers who recently purchased your product." Those buyers see "native review invites on Amazon's highest-traffic pages." Amazon's news post gives the homepage as an example. One tap leaves a star rating. The buyer can then write a full review and add photos or video if they want.

You build and manage campaigns in Amazon Ads Agent, the platform that combines what were the Amazon DSP and the Ads Console, "using the same bidding and budget controls" as other Amazon Ads campaigns. It's also available through Amazon's Unified API.

Who can use it, per Amazon:

• Advertisers: registered sellers and vendors "with an advertising console account in good standing and no active policy violations." Amazon doesn't mention Brand Registry.
• Products: those with "fewer than 1,000 total ratings and reviews." Amazon checks at setup and during the campaign, and pauses it at 1,000.
• Marketplaces: the United States only at launch. Amazon says other marketplaces "are planned for future releases."

The 3x figure comes from a closed beta in the US from June 3 to June 21, 2026, according to Amazon's footnote. It compares weekly reviews during the test with weekly reviews before it. Amazon hasn't described a control group, and the test ran for less than three weeks.

What Amazon hasn't said yet#

Four things a brand would want to know before spending aren't in Amazon's materials.

What you pay for. Amazon describes bids and budgets but not the billing event. Futurum Group reported on October 27, 2026 that "the format is billed per click, so advertisers pay whether or not a review follows". PPC Land noted on October 12, 2026 that Amazon hadn't disclosed pricing or a cost per review.

Whether the reviews are labeled. Amazon calls them the "same authentic reviews customers already leave." It doesn't say whether shoppers will see that a review came through a paid invite.

How it sits next to Vine. Amazon's materials don't mention Vine or any other review program.

Whether it's live. As of November 4, 2026 we couldn't find confirmation from Amazon or the trade press that the beta had opened.

What a 3x review rate does to the timeline#

Here's why a brand would pay for this. The numbers below are our arithmetic, not Amazon's. We assumed a product at 200 ratings that earns five a week on its own, and applied Amazon's 3x test result to it.

That's the case for it: a product reaches 1,000 ratings in about a year instead of three. The case against is that the invite reaches recent buyers whether or not they liked the product.

Branded Conversations, the other half of the announcement#

Branded Conversations upgrades Sponsored Brands prompts inside Alexa for Shopping. When a shopper taps a sponsored prompt, the assistant opens a conversation that draws on "brand-provided expertise": what sets the brand apart, which product fits which need, and what goes together. The conversations are "clearly marked as Sponsored" and launch in the US in January 2027.

"With Branded Conversations, we are giving brands the ability to bring their product expertise and storytelling into those conversations," said Muthu Muthukrishnan, Amazon Ads' vice president of Sponsored Ads. Amazon says that in early testing, "nearly 20% of shoppers who interact with a Sponsored Brands prompt continue the conversation about that brand." Amazon hasn't published pricing.

That matters because of where Amazon is taking shopping. It's keeping outside AI agents off its store and making Alexa for Shopping the main one, as we covered in our piece on Amazon blocking third-party shopping agents. Branded Conversations is a new paid way into that assistant.

Our read#

For a launch or a relaunch, we'd test Review Requests. Review count is one of the things a new product most visibly lacks, and this puts the ask on a page buyers are already looking at. We'd start with a fixed test budget on two or three ASINs, measure cost per new review against the weeks before, and stop if the reviews that come in skew negative.

We wouldn't use it to paper over a product problem. An invite on the homepage reaches unhappy buyers as well as happy ones. If your returns or one-star share is high, fix that first, because more reviews will just mean more of them.

For Branded Conversations, the work starts before January 2027. The assistant can only repeat what you give it, so the brief (what makes you different, which product fits which customer, what pairs with what) needs to be written and checked against your detail pages. It's the same thinking that goes into strong listings and content. If you're running Amazon advertising with us, we'll plan both formats into the 2027 budget.

What to do now#