You have probably spent hours working keywords into your A+ modules. That work has almost certainly done nothing for your ranking, and the field that would have helped was sitting unfilled two clicks away.
Content marketing on Amazon is unusual because it happens entirely inside someone else's product. There is no blog, no owned domain, no email list at the centre of it. What there is instead is a set of six surfaces on the detail page and around it, each with its own rules, its own audience, and its own relationship to ranking.
Most brands treat these as decoration — things you fill in once because the checklist says to. That is a defensible reading of how they looked in 2020. It is a poor reading of 2026, where Amazon attributes real double-digit sales lift to properly built content, has made the most powerful tier free, and has introduced an AI layer that reads your content to decide whether to recommend you at all.
This is what each surface actually does, what is indexed, and what the numbers say.
Owned content surface — a placement on or around a product detail page where a brand controls the content directly, as distinct from paid placements which are rented and from reviews which are contributed. On Amazon these surfaces are free to use, but each has its own indexing behaviour, so filling them all with the same content is a common and costly simplification.
The Six Surfaces You Own
| Surface | Where it sits | Its job | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| A+ Content | Below bullets, replaces description | Answer product objections | Free |
| Premium A+ | Same slot, richer modules | Video, hotspots, deeper storytelling | Free if eligible |
| Brand Story | "From the brand", above A+ | Brand trust and catalog cross-sell | Free |
| Brand Store | Separate destination | Browse your catalog without competitors | Free |
| Listing video | Image carousel | Demonstrate, convert | Production cost only |
| Reviews and Q&A | Below the fold | Third-party corroboration | Free, indirectly influenced |
How they divide the work
The clean split is this: A+ answers questions about the product. Brand Story answers questions about you. The Store lets someone browse the range. Video demonstrates. Reviews corroborate. Brands that put the same brand-heritage message into all of them waste four surfaces to say one thing.
The other structural point is that these compound rather than substitute. A shopper who arrives from a Sponsored Brands ad, reads a complete Brand Story, scrolls through Premium A+ answering their specific doubt, then clicks through to a curated Store has had four brand impressions in one session, none of which cost media spend.
What Is Indexed and What Is Not
This is the section that saves the most wasted effort, and it is the one most content guides get wrong.
A+ body text: historically not indexed
The text inside your A+ modules has historically not been indexed for Amazon keyword search. Repeating your primary keyword eleven times across your modules does not move your ranking, no matter how naturally you worked it in. This is not a subtle effect that is hard to measure — the mechanism simply is not there.
What that text does do is convert, and increasingly, feed the AI layer that reads your listing to answer conversational queries. Both are good reasons to write it well. Neither is a keyword ranking reason.
Image alt text: a different story
Alt text on A+ images is a genuine opportunity and Amazon's own documentation notes it matters. It exists for accessibility first, which is reason enough to write it properly, and it carries descriptive weight in a way body copy does not.
Write alt text that actually describes the image and what it demonstrates, in natural language. Do not stuff it — a screen reader user hearing a keyword list is a genuine accessibility failure, and Amazon can reject content for it.
You spent hours working keywords into your A+ modules. That work does nothing for ranking. The alt text field, which most brands leave empty, is the one that counts.
Where keywords do belong
Title, bullets, backend search terms, and structured attributes. That is the ranking surface. A+ and Brand Story are conversion and AI-comprehension surfaces. Treating all of them as keyword real estate produces content that reads badly to humans and does nothing for the algorithm.
A+ Content and the Lift Figures
A+ Content replaces the standard 2,000-character plain-text description with rich modules: lifestyle imagery, feature callouts, comparison charts and text blocks. Amazon attributes a sales lift of roughly 8% to Basic A+, rising to as much as 20% for well-implemented Premium A+.
What separates A+ that converts from A+ that looks finished
- Objection handling, not feature listing. The shopper reaching your A+ has a specific doubt. Sizing, durability, compatibility, whether it works for their situation. Answer those in order of frequency.
- The comparison chart is the most underused module. Comparing your own range helps a shopper self-select rather than bounce to a competitor, and it raises average order value when the more expensive option is genuinely right for them.
- Scale reference. The single most common source of returns and negative reviews is a product arriving larger or smaller than expected.
- Text that survives being read alone. Modules get scanned, not read in sequence.
- Mobile first. Mobile accounts for the clear majority of Amazon traffic, and a comparison chart that is illegible on a phone is a chart nobody reads.
The sequencing that works
Lead with the strongest objection, not the strongest feature. Then differentiation against the category. Then the comparison chart. Then brand credibility. A shopper who has already decided to buy scrolls past all of it; a shopper who has not is looking for the specific thing stopping them.
The full build is in our Amazon A+ content guide.
Premium A+ and How to Qualify
Premium A+ used to be gated behind significant spend. In 2026 it is free and broadly available to brand-registered sellers, which is one of the more valuable changes Amazon has made for smaller brands.
What it adds over Basic
- Video modules inside the A+ area itself.
- Interactive hotspots that let shoppers explore features without leaving the page.
- Larger image formats and more visual real estate.
- Navigation carousels and richer comparison layouts.
- Q&A modules, which are a useful home for the questions that used to live elsewhere on the page.
Qualification
Amazon adjusts the criteria periodically and does not publish a fixed rule set, so the reliable answer is to check A+ Content Manager and see whether Premium is available on your account. The historical requirements have included a published Brand Story across all brand-owned ASINs and a track record of approved A+ projects — commonly cited as at least five in the preceding twelve months.
If Premium A+ is available on your account and your listing has real traffic, there is very little reason to leave it unused. It costs nothing, Amazon attributes materially higher lift to it than Basic, and the video and hotspot modules do conversion work that static images cannot. Check A+ Content Manager today rather than assuming you are not eligible.
The Brand Story requirement also means these two surfaces are sequenced: publish Brand Story first, then A+ projects, then Premium becomes reachable. Building them in the reverse order is a common source of frustration.
The Brand Story Carousel
Arguably the most underused section on the entire detail page, and one of the clearest remaining opportunities to raise average order value without spending on advertising.
What it is
A swipeable carousel of cards in the "From the brand" section, with a consistent background behind them. On desktop it typically sits above your A+ content. On mobile it often appears closer to the top of the page than brands expect, which means the first card has to earn attention immediately.
It is created inside A+ Content Manager and requires Brand Registry. Once published it carries across every ASIN in your catalog, which is what makes it efficient — one build, applied everywhere.
What each card should do
- Card one: who you are, in one line. This is the one most shoppers see.
- ASIN Showcase module: cross-sell your other products from inside a single detail page, and include a direct link to your Store via your brand store ID.
- Founder or origin card, if it is genuinely differentiating rather than generic.
- A key question card, answering something that applies across the range.
Why it earns its place
Brand Story is the only surface where you talk about the brand rather than the product, and it is doing cross-sell work at the same time. A shopper who arrives for one SKU and discovers the range through the ASIN Showcase has a higher basket than one who does not, and none of that traffic cost anything.
It also functions as a landing page validator: a shopper clicking a Sponsored Brands ad who arrives to a fully built Brand Story receives a far more complete brand impression than one arriving at a bare listing. The detail is in our Brand Story module guide.
The Brand Store
Your only Amazon destination where competitors are not visible, and the numbers behind maintaining it are unusually clear.
| Signal | Effect |
|---|---|
| Updated within 90 days | ~11% more repeat visitors |
| Updated within 90 days | ~13% higher attributed sales per visitor |
| Brand ads landing on Store | ~55% more pageviews than other destinations |
What that implies
Two things, both actionable. First, freshness is a measurable variable rather than housekeeping — a Store updated quarterly outperforms one built once and abandoned, which is what most Stores are. Second, if you are running Sponsored Brands, sending that traffic to your Store rather than to a single ASIN produces substantially deeper sessions.
What a good Store actually contains
- A landing page that orients rather than sells. Shoppers arriving here are browsing, not deciding.
- Category or use-case pages, not a flat product grid. Help people self-select.
- Video on the landing page, where autoplay and sound behave better than on a listing.
- Seasonal or campaign updates, which is the freshness signal.
- Bundle and cross-sell curation that a detail page cannot do.
Our Amazon storefront guide covers the build.
Which surface is empty?
We will audit your six content surfaces, check whether Premium A+ is available on your account, and tell you which gap is costing you the most.
Book a Strategy Call →The Ecom Profit Box
Eleven playbooks on listings, conversion, images, and email. Built for operators, no fluff, no email sequence.
Grab It Free →Listing Video
The highest-leverage content asset most brand-registered sellers are still not using.
Main image video sits in the first carousel position, autoplays, and reaches every shopper who lands on the listing regardless of how they arrived. It is underused for a structural reason rather than a strategic one: it requires a production asset and produces conversion lift rather than a clean return-on-ad-spend report, which makes it easy to defer.
The constraints that govern it
- It autoplays muted. Anything carried by voiceover communicates nothing to most viewers.
- The product must be visibly doing its job within the first few seconds. A brand-led opening spends the attention budget before the product appears.
- Fifteen to thirty seconds is the working range for listing placement.
- Text must be legible on a phone, since mobile dominates Amazon traffic.
Video also feeds the other surfaces. The same shoot produces the main image video, Premium A+ video modules, Store landing page video, and Sponsored Brands Video creative. Commissioning it once for one placement and then discovering you need four cuts is the expensive path.
Production detail is in our Amazon product video overview and the product page video conversion guide.
Reviews and Questions as Content
The surface you do not write and cannot control, which is precisely why it carries the most weight.
Why it belongs in a content strategy
Everything else on this page is you describing yourself. The review corpus is other people describing you, and both shoppers and the AI layer weight it accordingly. The assistant answering a conversational question about your product draws on review and question content for context you never wrote.
What you can legitimately influence
- Volume and recency through compliant review requests.
- Semantic coverage. Ninety reviews mentioning specific services, use cases and outcomes are more useful than four hundred saying "great product."
- Your responses, which are indexed and are a genuinely underrated place to answer a recurring question in text.
- The questions themselves, by pre-empting the common ones in A+ so they stop being asked and start being answered.
The feedback loop worth building
Read your negative reviews monthly and theme them. Every recurring complaint is either a product problem or a content problem, and the content problems are cheap to fix. A review saying the product was smaller than expected is telling you your image stack lacks a scale reference, not that your product is wrong.
Our negative review response playbook covers handling the corpus properly.
What the AI Layer Reads
Since May 13, 2026, Alexa for Shopping sits inside Amazon's main search bar generating AI overviews and side-by-side comparisons. Your content is now being read by something that has to decide whether to recommend you.
What it draws on
- Structured attributes, which feed comparisons directly. Every empty field is a question it cannot answer.
- Bullet structure, where leading with the specific feature and then the benefit parses more cleanly than benefit-first marketing language.
- Natural-language description covering use cases, materials, dimensions and compatibility.
- A+ content text, including inside modules — which is why writing it well matters even though it is not keyword-indexed.
- Reviews and questions, supplying context you did not author.
The reframe this forces
Content written to persuade a scrolling human and content written to be comprehensible to a machine are not in conflict, but they emphasize different things. Machines reward specificity, completeness and plain description. Humans reward clarity and relevance to their particular doubt. The overlap is large, and the thing both punish is vagueness.
Practically: write in complete factual statements, cover materials and dimensions explicitly rather than implying them, and stop using adjectives where a number would do. Our COSMO vs A9 vs A10 breakdown covers the underlying mechanics.
Amazon Posts Is Gone
Worth stating plainly, because a large amount of content strategy advice still tells you to use it.
Amazon announced on June 3, 2025 that the Posts programme would be discontinued. New post creation was disabled between June 16 and 23 depending on account type, and the programme fully shut down on July 31, 2025. Existing Posts were removed from every placement and the APIs return errors. Amazon's own message to sellers said the change was to allow focus on enhancing its sponsored creative solutions.
What this tells you about direction
Amazon is moving away from free, social-style organic tools and toward paid ad products with measurable performance. Posts never became a primary discovery channel — shopping intent on Amazon is immediate rather than browsy, and a scrollable feed sat awkwardly against that.
Where that content effort should go instead
- Lifestyle imagery that was destined for Posts belongs in A+ modules and the Brand Story carousel, which sit where the purchase decision actually happens rather than below the fold.
- Product stories belong in the Brand Store.
- Short captions become ad headlines or off-Amazon social copy.
- Use-case content becomes creator briefs or video concepts.
Guides published after mid-2025 still describe Posts as an active programme, occasionally with detailed instructions for using it. If a content strategy you are reading tells you to publish Posts, treat everything else in it with the same scepticism — it has not been updated in over a year.
The 90-Day Content Calendar
Built in dependency order, because several of these unlock the next.
Publish across all brand-owned ASINs. It carries catalog-wide from one build and is a prerequisite for Premium A+ eligibility.
Top five by revenue. Objection-led, comparison chart included, alt text written properly on every image.
Use-case pages rather than a flat grid. Then point your Sponsored Brands traffic at it.
One shoot, four destinations: main image, Premium A+ module, Store landing, Sponsored Brands Video.
Check A+ Content Manager for eligibility. If available, rebuild your top ASINs with video and hotspot modules.
The 90-day freshness window is a measurable variable. Put a recurring reminder on it rather than treating it as optional.
Why this order
Brand Story first because it is catalog-wide from a single build and gates Premium A+. A+ on revenue ASINs next because that is where lift compounds against actual traffic. Store before video because the Store is where video works hardest. Premium last because eligibility depends on the A+ track record you built in the middle.
Measuring Content, Honestly
Content attribution on Amazon is genuinely harder than ad attribution, so here is what you can and cannot know.
What you can measure
- Unit session percentage before and after, on a listing with enough traffic to detect a change. This is the cleanest available signal.
- Store analytics — visitors, pageviews per visit, sales attributed to Store traffic.
- Return rate, which should fall if your content set expectations better.
- Query breadth in Search Query Performance, which reflects listing-level changes rather than A+ specifically.
What you cannot cleanly isolate
Which module did the work. Which Brand Story card mattered. Whether the lift came from A+ or from the image change you shipped the same week. Amazon does not provide module-level engagement data, and content changes rarely happen in isolation.
The measurement discipline that helps
- Change one surface at a time on your test ASINs, even though it is slower.
- Wait a full fortnight before judging any single change, and a quarter before judging a programme.
- Use control ASINs where you change nothing, so seasonality does not masquerade as a result.
- Record the date of every content change in one place. Most brands cannot answer "when did we last update this" and that alone makes attribution impossible.
The lift figures Amazon publishes — roughly 8% for Basic A+, up to 20% for Premium — are averages across an enormous and varied population. Treat them as a reason to build, not as a forecast for your specific ASIN. For the reporting side, see our guide to Search Query Performance.
The Short Version
- A+ body text has historically not been indexed for Amazon keyword search. Keyword-stuffing your modules does nothing for ranking. Image alt text is indexed and is worth writing properly.
- Amazon attributes roughly 8% sales lift to Basic A+ and up to 20% to well-implemented Premium A+. Premium is now free and broadly available to brand-registered sellers.
- Brand Story is the most underused section on the detail page. It carries catalog-wide from one build and is a prerequisite for Premium A+ eligibility, so build it first.
- Brand Stores updated within 90 days see about 11% more repeat visitors and 13% higher attributed sales per visitor. Brand ad traffic sent to a Store generates roughly 55% more pageviews.
- Amazon discontinued the Posts programme on July 31, 2025. Any guide still instructing you to publish Posts has not been updated in over a year.
- The AI layer reads your A+ text, attributes, bullets and reviews to decide whether to recommend you, which is a separate reason to write content well beyond conversion.
- Build order matters: Brand Story, then A+ on revenue ASINs, then Store, then batched video, then Premium A+ once eligibility unlocks.