Amazon Prompt Ads go from free Beta to paid CPC on March 25

Amazon confirmed the timeline: Prompt Ads — the ad slot inside Rufus AI answers — moves from free Beta to paid CPC on March 25. Fourteen days from the announcement to the bill.

During the beta, your SP and SB campaigns have been eligible for Prompt placements at zero additional cost. Amazon’s been serving your ASINs inside Rufus answers, you’ve been getting attributed sales, and none of it cost you a cent. That window closes March 25.

Rufus now has 300M+ users. It drove roughly $12B in incremental sales last year. This isn’t an experimental placement anymore — it’s a primary surface, and Amazon is turning on the meter.

Five things to do before March 25

1. Pull the Prompts Report — today

Ads Console → Reports → Prompts. This report has been live during the beta. It tells you:

Which specific prompts surfaced your ASINs
Which drove clicks, and which converted
Which ones are semantically wrong for your product and have been silently racking up impressions

Pause the wrong ones now. The moment this becomes paid, those misaligned prompts will burn CPC for clicks that never would’ve converted.

2. Rewrite the listing for Q&A, not just SEO

Prompt Ads don’t score purely on keyword match. Rufus reads your detail page, A+, Brand Story, Q&A, and reviews to decide whether your product answers the buyer’s question.

That means:

Bullets should be complete sentences that answer a frequent question (“Does this work in a dishwasher? Yes — rated for 85°C / 185°F, top-rack only.”)
A+ should include a comparison table and an FAQ module
Backend attributes (material, use-case, size, scenario) need to be fully populated — Rufus uses them for intent matching

Listings written for the old keyword-SEO playbook will underperform here even if your bids are right.

3. Prioritize which ASINs get defended first

Don’t spread thin. Order:

High-AOV, high-margin products (CPC premium is worth it)
Products that require explanation before the buyer will buy (Rufus is the explanation)
Products with lots of common Q&A (high inherent prompt volume)
Products easily substituted by competitors (defensive spend)
Products protected by your brand term (already shielded)

4. Raise budget on high-potential ASINs

Rufus-buyer intent is strong. Conversion rate on Prompt placements in the beta has been running above standard SP. Expect CPC to bid up fast as more sellers activate.

+10–20% daily budget on high-potential ASINs
Keep auto + manual broad running to catch new long-tail intent queries
Monitor the Prompt-attributed ACoS separately from SP overall

5. Baseline compare 3/1–3/24 vs 3/25–4/15

When the meter turns on, you want to know exactly what changed. Track:

Prompt impressions / clicks / orders, day over day
Overall SP CPC and ACoS (is the Prompt CPC cannibalizing standard SP?)
Brand vs non-brand traffic share
Detail-page conversion rate (did Rufus change who lands on your page?)

Ten minutes a day. The teams that track this will see the cannibalization pattern inside a week. The teams that don’t will argue about ACoS for a month.

The shift underneath

The move from search-bar keywords to conversational question-answering is one of the bigger traffic-logic changes Amazon has made in years. March 25 is when it stops being free. The sellers who pre-built for it get a head start; the rest learn it the expensive way.