Unredacted FTC complaint alleges Amazon ad prices up to 250% over auction

On November 5, 2026, the Federal Trade Commission and 22 states filed an updated complaint in their lawsuit over Amazon's search advertising auctions, with many of the details that were blacked out in August now public.

The new version alleges that Amazon raised ad prices "by as much as 50% above auction results on ordinary days" and "by as much as 250% on major shopping days like Prime Day or Black Friday." Those are allegations. Amazon has denied the case's claims, and no court has ruled.

We covered the original suit, filed August 31, 2026, in our explainer on the FTC's Amazon ad auction lawsuit. This piece is about what's new, and why the timing matters with Black Friday falling on November 27, 2026.

What the unredacted complaint adds#

The FTC's release describes newly unredacted details of the alleged scheme, and the FTC's case page lists the updated complaint as a November 5, 2026 filing. The August version described Amazon replacing a second-price auction result with a higher "soft reserve" price, but left the size of the alleged increases blacked out. The new filing fills in numbers, dates and internal messages.

As described in the FTC's release, the complaint alleges:

• Ordinary days: prices allegedly raised by as much as 50% above auction results.
• Major shopping days: allegedly by as much as 250% on days like Prime Day or Black Friday.
• 2021 holiday season: the complaint says advertisers' average cost per click rose 20%, with some advertisers seeing increases above 200%.
• 2022 holiday season: the complaint says Amazon raised its surcharges to increase its revenue by $87 million worldwide.
• Prime Day 2023: the complaint says one large food and beverage advertiser was subjected to price increases of more than 100%, which the complaint says Amazon internally acknowledged was "destroying campaign performance."
• 2023 planning: the complaint says Amazon executives discussed the need to find an additional $40 million in revenue to meet corporate financial targets. It quotes an email from the head of Amazon Ads, who isn't named in the release, saying: "I'd like to pull out all of the stops (without doing unnatural acts) to close our gaps to plan."

The release also describes an advertiser asking whether "something has changed with respect to the second price auction process." The FTC says an Amazon account manager replied: "This year the marketplace is even more crowded than any year previous, and we are seeing the spike in CPCs." The FTC alleges that answer misled the advertiser.

We read the FTC's press release and its case page, which lists the updated complaint as a November 5, 2026 filing. We couldn't download the complaint PDF itself as of November 6, 2026, so the figures above are as the FTC's release states them.

The alleged increases, side by side#

The figures in the release measure different things, so they aren't one series. Read them as the scale the complaint alleges, not as a trend.

What Amazon says#

Amazon's August 31 response calls the lawsuit "misguided" and says: "In no scenario does an advertiser pay more than their bid." It describes the soft reserve as "a real-time minimum value" meant to reflect what a placement is worth and says average cost per click "remained flat when adjusted for inflation" from 2019 through 2024.

Search Engine Journal reported that the FTC's November 5 release didn't include a new Amazon response to the unredacted details.

There's no conflict between "up to 250% above the auction result" and "never more than the bid," and that's worth understanding. If the second-price result was low and your bid was high, a price well above the auction result can still sit at or under your bid. Both statements can be true at once. Which one describes your campaigns is something your own reports can show.

Our read: your bid is the ceiling, so set it like one#

We said this when the suit was filed and the new figures make it sharper. Whatever the court decides, the working assumption on Amazon should be that your bid is close to your price, especially on the biggest days. Many of the complaint's most specific allegations are about peak periods: holiday seasons and Prime Day.

That's the habit to break before Black Friday on November 27 and Cyber Monday on November 30. A lot of event-day playbooks raise bids sharply on the theory that the auction will only charge what it takes to win. If the complaint is even partly right about how pricing behaved on those days in 2021 to 2023, an inflated bid is the number you should expect to pay, not a safety margin.

None of this is legal advice. If you think you were affected, talk to your own counsel. We're not lawyers, and the case is at an early stage. What we can do is help you read your own data. It's the check we run in every retail media audit and part of how we manage Amazon advertising.

What to check before Black Friday#