Amazon’s World Product Graph aims to list products it doesn’t even sell

Amazon has drawn up a plan to hold data on almost every product sold online, including the ones it doesn’t stock. The project, called World Product Graph, would let you compare models, colours and alternatives on Amazon without opening Google, a brand’s website or a Reddit thread, according to an internal document reviewed by Reuters. If it works, the place where you research a purchase and the place where you pay for it become the same company.

The memo is blunt about the motive. “Amazon cannot be the go-destination for every shopping mission if customers must leave to research product relationships on Google, brand websites, and review sites,” it says. It even invents a happy customer who used to spend an hour on Reddit working out what to buy and now finds that the store “finally knows what it’s selling.” The quote is made up, as is customary in a memo written as a mock press release, but it shows exactly which habit Amazon wants to break.

The data would come from two directions. Some brands and retailers would send product information to Amazon continuously, and Amazon would crawl other retailers’ websites itself. According to the document, Coca-Cola and Bayer have already agreed to contribute data, and Amazon held a “CEO-level” summit with Procter & Gamble to set up a trial. Reuters could not establish how the crawling would work or whether Amazon would ask every site for permission, and the three companies did not respond to its questions.

The memo also admits a problem with Amazon’s own AI. Of Rufus, the shopping assistant Amazon renamed Alexa for Shopping in May, it says: “Many Rufus answers are factually wrong or incomplete, but customers lack expertise to detect these errors.” The document puts usage at about 83 million searches a week and calls running them expensive. Richer product data would, on paper, let Amazon answer with cheaper models and make fewer mistakes. Amazon told Reuters those usage figures are “significantly outdated” and that Alexa for Shopping is roughly 97% accurate worldwide.

There is a second target: AI shopping agents, the software that compares prices and buys on your behalf. Amazon blocked Meta’s Muse agent from its store in September and is still in court with Perplexity over the same kind of access. People familiar with the plan told Reuters that if Amazon owns the biggest stockpile of product data, those agents will have to come looking on Amazon.com anyway, which would also protect its growing advertising business.

The gap Amazon wants to close is easy to measure. A Morgan Stanley report from 2025 found that 57% of online shoppers start their product research on Google and only 16% on Amazon. When shoppers already know exactly what they want, the order flips: 41% start on Amazon, 23% on Google and 18% on Walmart. World Product Graph is aimed at the first group, the people still deciding.

There are good reasons to treat this as a plan rather than a product. A PR/FAQ is Amazon’s standard six-page pitch for a new idea, and plenty never ship; the people Reuters spoke to said this one could be changed or dropped for financial or other reasons. Amazon says the “brainstorming document” doesn’t necessarily reflect its current plans. A catalog run by the store that sells you the product is also not a neutral guide. The memo talks about steering shoppers with their purchase history, and nothing in the reporting says how products Amazon doesn’t sell would be ranked against the ones it does, or which countries would get the service first.

The project sits in Amazon’s Selection & Catalog Systems unit under vice president Robert Tekiela. The memo sets an aspirational launch date of October 1, 2027, and describes the idea as a step beyond Shop Direct and Buy for Me, features that already list products from other sites with Amazon as the middleman. Amazon is moving staff onto the project, according to one person, though nobody Reuters spoke to could say whether that date is realistic.

“Customers have always been able to find products on Amazon,” Tekiela says in the document. “What’s been missing is understanding.” If the plan ships, that understanding will come from the company that also runs the checkout.

Tags: amazon, online shopping, Alexa for Shopping, AI shopping assistants, Reuters, Rufus