#537 - Helium 10's New MCP, Keyword Searches NOT Dead, & TikTok Bans AI | Weekly Buzz 7/16/26

Helium 10 releases a super powerful MCP that will revolutionize the way you manage your Amazon accounts. New data shows that AI and Alexa for shopping have not decreased the number of people who use Amazon search bar for keywords. These stories and more on today's episode. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the AMM podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 weekly buzz. We give you a rundown of all the goings on in the Amazon, Tik Tok shop, and e-commerce world. We let you know what new features Helium 10 has, and we also give a training tip of the week. So, let's get started and see what's buzzing. All right, guys. So, usually we start off with some just general e-commerce stories because that's usually the top story of the week. But today, we're actually talking about something with Helium 10. And this like is pretty much the biggest story in all of e-commerce in my opinion just because there is now a revolutionary new way to do research that could take things that might have taken you hours and hours to do and turn it into minutes. And so let's go ahead and talk about what that is, how to install and use the Helium 10 MCP. Now, first of all, what is an MCP? Basically, uh the Helium 10 MCP is something that is going to allow you to use uh different AI tools such as Claude or Chat GBT, etc. And it'll connect directly to Helium 10 data. So instead of having to go inside of Helium 10, use our filters and things, you can actually run Helium 10 through your own software such as Claude and just enter in phrases and and talk to Claude and extract data that would take a lot longer to do using the Helium 10 interface. Now, there's going to be a lot of different trainings we're going to do, but let me first show you how to install it. Right. So, this is now available as of today to all Helium 10 Diamond and above users. So, what you need to do, I'm just going to show you how to do it in Claude here. Go into Claude and then hit customize and then go to connectors. Once you're there, hit browse and type in Helium 10. And you will see the Helium 10 uh official in the Cloud Connector store. That's what this is called or directory. and you can just go ahead and click on it and then hit the button that says connect. Once you do that, it's going to open up probably a Chrome browser and you need to select which sub account you want to connect it to. You can only connect to one sub account at a time. Once you select which Helium 10 account you want to connect to, then you hit continue. Once you do that, it's going to go ahead and take you back to Claude and you can just exit out. And if you want to just make sure that it worked, just type into Claude, please check my Helium 10 connector. And once you do that, it's going to check to make sure you're connected. You you might get different messages depending on how your own, you know, like company has security on there. For example, here it's telling me, do do I want to uh always allow? And so I'm just going to hit allow. And then it's going to say a message here. Your Helium 10 connector is working great. Here's a quick snapshot. It's going to tell me what my usage is, how much usage I have left. All right. So now, what kind of things can you do and what's an example of how powerful this is? You're familiar with tools such as Blackbox, right? To to find a new product. Watch this. Uh, I'm going to do something here where I'm just wondering, are there any coffin related products that are selling well right now? All right. So, I'm going to type in here, use Blackbox to find any products in the home and kitchen category that is doing $1,000 of sales or more per month and has the word coffin in the title and has less than 500 reviews. So, what's going to happen now is it's going to search our database of 2 billion products and return to me any products that hit this criteria. And then, as you can see right here in Claude, I can see all the products that hit that uh criteria. Like, here is a coffin shadow box. Here's a coffin bath mat. Here's a coffin bookshelf that did $3,000 of sales and only has 68 reviews. Yeah. And for and here's a coffin bookshelf that only has five reviews doing almost $3,000. And so instantly I have a list of products here. But here's the thing. We can now take it a step further. Let's say this bathmat looks interesting. I might want to have that to complement my coffin shelf. I can just take this as and follow up and say, "Hey, what keywords is this product?" you know, and I paste the as in of the bathmat ranking for in the top 20 spots uh in the top 20 organic spots. And now it should even know even though I didn't say cerebro, it's going to go check our cerebro database. And Claude is now connecting Helium 10 and it's going to tell me any keyword that is probably driving sales to this coffin bathmat. And take a look here. It says, "Hey, you know what? There's 42 keywords that this product is ranked in the top 20. And I could see uh some of these here. Spooky bathmat, coffin home decor, gothic bathroom rug. And so it pulled in all of the keywords where this product is showing up in the top 20. Now, you might be thinking, wait, Bradley, everybody, every tool out there already has an MCP. What makes Helium 10 so gamechanging or unique? Remember guys, Helium 10 has pretty much more tools in it than all the other ones put together and functions that nobody else has. I can start taking this a step further. Watch what I'm going to do right now. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to type and take this a step further. I'm going to say, you know what, for this product, look in brand analytics. No other tool has this. For all the different weeks from October through December 2025, which keywords it was one of the top three clicked for and had at least 1% conversion share. Remember, this product is not in my account. So, I I can't look this up in search performance. If if it was my product, I could use this MCP to do that. But, I'm looking at brand analytics to get where Amazon is saying this product had verified sales. No other tool out there can do this guys. And I'm looking at I don't know like what 12 uh 16 weeks total. And then I says and also look at the historical cerebro database and tell me for the month during Halloween, what were the keywords over 300 search volume that this was ranked in the top 10 organic positions for? Everything I just said right here, guys, no other tool can do. These are unique data points that Helium 10 has. And this is, you know, pretty valuable. You can kind of see where I'm going with this. This is a spooky product and I'm asking for information about what was going on last year, uh, you know, from October to December, thinking that, hey, that's a probably key month, especially after Halloween and, you know, during Christmas time. And so now I want to see the difference between these keywords and the ones that it's ranking for now when I'm recording this in the middle of July. And just a little bit later, take a look at the results. I can see here uh the different brand analytics keywords that brought its sales. Like look at here, it had 25% of the conversion share of the keyword coffin bathmat. It had 25% of coffin rug. Uh what about the historical cerebra? What was it during do doing during October? You know, which was during Halloween. Um look at the different keywords that it was ranking for. Haunted mansion rug, gothic bathroom rug. Now what I can do is I can take this even further and say, "Hey, show me in keyword tracker which keywords that it got sales from that maybe my product is not currently ranking in the top 15." And now instantly I'm going to have a plan of action to say, "Oh, I better start advertising here in July, August, maybe for some of these keywords so that I can be ranking for it in October." I can even take it a step further. If I'm using Helium 10 ads in my Helium 10 account, I could just start start going in and saying, "Hey, show me which of these keywords that, you know, my competitor is getting is going to get sales from in October. Which ones am I not advertising for? Which ones is my sponsored ad not showing up in the top five? And give me a bid recommendation." I mean, guys, the possibilities are endless here. what you're actually doing is not different than maybe what you've already done, but the time that it would take to do all these things and make this decision and download reports and things, that's where the difference is. All right? Like, how long would it take you to download, you know, 20 weeks of Amazon brand analytics data that each have 2 million lines of keywords or even more, right? And then extract the keywords that go to this product. The Cerebro historical, if you've never used that, you would have no access to that. you would not be able to just go in and and say, "Hey, which keywords was this product ranking for in October of of last year?" You could do that in Helium 10 now. Uh but this one uh is going to do it automatically and even cross reference every week going forward, guys. I'm going to have like a different strategy that you guys can use. So, and I'm also going to have skills that are my own like pre-programmed kind of like processes that can do cool and amazing stuff kind of like what I just showed you. Make sure to follow my Instagram. All right, Serious Sellers Podcast. Make sure to follow me on LinkedIn. Just look for my name, Bradley Sutton, to both of these platforms. Going forward, I'm going to start posting some of my best skills. Like I I have one that I just made where it's like, "Hey, for all of my keywords that um I'm not getting impressions for in advertising. Tell me if I'm indexed, if I'm searchable. Uh and if so, like tell me when I became unindexed for." Like stuff that you probably can't even imagine. Hey, I didn't even know this was even possible. you're going to be able to do it in seconds using these skills that I create. So again, Serious Sellers Podcast on Instagram, follow me on LinkedIn. Get ready for a lot of cool strategies that is based on this MCP. Next up, we've got a story from Tech Times and it's entitled Tik Tok Shop bans AI voices from live commerce streams. Violations now dent account health score. So what's happening is is Tik Tok shop is formerly banning AI generated voices and pre-recorded audio tracks, right? So what was happening is people doing live streams trying to sell products. They wouldn't even be talking on there. They they might just be showing their hands or something and they would have this like recording that that's going or they would have like an AI talk and interact with the audience. Tik Tok shop is like, "Nope, we're not about that life. You can't do that anymore." This is a trend guys. You know, maybe you're not selling on a Tik Tok shop, but the reason I I I wanted to kind of highlight this story is that, you know, there's different things like this that are happening because this is a ever, you know, kind of like rapidly changing um thing this, you know, AI advertising and things like that. Like, you know, you heard might have heard stories about how in New York you can't use, I think, something like uh AI avatars to as influencers to try and sell or advertise a product, you know, which potentially could have implications for Amazon. um you know you can't like control your advertising not to you know do in New York uh uh but you know that that that's something that has changed because of AI. Tik Tok here in this article is saying hey don't use AI voices. Um, is there a future where they might severely restrict AI, you know, kind of like influencers for Instagram or or on Amazon's uh even further? Time will tell. But watch these stories, guys, because you have to make sure you're in compliance. If you didn't know this story or this new rule on Tik Tok shop and you were using like a AI voice, your account is going to get dinged. Uh, it says here. All right. Next up, uh, some new data has come out from my team. Uh, every 6 months I run some deep research on data to try and see has Rufus or Alexa for shopping really change the way people search? And the reason why I do this is because oh my god, if you were just to believe everything you see on LinkedIn or or different, you know, outlets out there, you would think that nobody uses search or keywords or keywords are not important anymore. or Alexa for shopping, the artist formerly known as Rufus has taken over the way that people discover or find products on Amazon. And so, you know, people are trying to say, "Oh, yeah, you don't have to worry about keywords. Keyword research is not as important anymore. Soon the search bar is going to be completely irrelevant. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah." Is that true, guys? Is that what is happening? For 2 years, I'm almost one of the only ones who has been saying, "No, this is absolute nonsense, guys. This is not happening. We need to watch out for it, right? But it is absolutely not to the extent that some people might try and make you believe. And what's happening now 2 years after Rufus was first launched guys that let's take a look at the data. The first thing that I look at is search query performance search volume. This is actual searches done by by users and this is a number directly from Amazon. Helium 10 has that entire database going back to the very beginning of search create performance. millions and millions, tens of hundreds of millions of searches, we've gotten our database and a lot of keywords have data for a continuous 2 years now straight and 6 months before Rufus even started. So the first theory is that hey, if more people are just using Alexa to discover products on Amazon and are bypassing the search bar and bypassing keywords, what would we see? A huge decrease in search volume. Is that what has happened? Absolutely not. Take a look at this data, guys. These are the searches on a certain big number of keywords that that we have consistent search create performance data. And again, going back to January of 2024, this is before there was ever a such thing as Rufus or Alexa. And as you can see, the search volume has stayed super consistent. There's a peak here in June of 2026, just last month. You might be thinking, "Oh, wow, Bradley, it's actually showing there. there's even more searches. Now, that's not necessarily what this is showing. Don't forget, this was the first year that Amazon uh Prime Day was in June, and that's why you see this peak. But outside of this peak where where there's it was a weird month to have a spike when it's normally July, the number of searches have been very similar. Here's all the raw data right here. Those of you watching this on YouTube, you can see that searches have actually been up about 3 to 4%. So, the bottom line is if let's say you know a 100,000 people were searching for your keywords related to your product before Rufus or Alexa was a thing back in 2024, guess what? The same number of people or a little bit more are searching with those exact keywords today in 2026. Has there been this mass exodus of people not using keywords to find products on Amazon? No. And if you guys ask yourselves, those of you who shop on Amazon yourselves, how many of you are still using keywords for the products that you know what you want to buy, it's probably all of you are still doing it. All right? And this was like my my theory all along for the last 2 years is is that Alexa and Rufus was not necessarily meant to replace search per se. When you know what you want, you know the example I always use is if you want a 64 ounce insulated water bottle, you type in a keyword 64 ounce insulated water bottle into Amazon search. There is nothing that an AI can do that is going to make that process easier for now. All right? Like I'm not going to have a two-way conversation with Alexa or Sparky from Walmart to talk about this one. I already know what I want. Where would I not go first to the search bar? There are circumstances. It's kind of like when you don't know what you want to buy, right? Like maybe I'm going to a uh or my my daughter this weekend is doing a um like a carnival themed party or a circus themed party. I don't know what to wear. So, what would I do? In the old days, I would just Google it, look up blogs, look up, you know, Pinterest or something. Uh nowadays, maybe I would ask Chat GBT, "Hey, what should I wear for a carnival themed costume party?" Right? um because I don't know what keyword to search for. But what Alexa can do now is instead of having to go to these outside sources to discover what you want, you can do that right within Amazon, right? Amazon is smart. This is a smart move. But again, if you already know what you want, which is what most people go to Amazon for. You just type in the keyword. That has not changed. The next data point that this study looked at was the number of clicks. Because what are we looking for? If somebody searches a keyword and then they do anything else on the page, it no longer is going to be followed through the search query performance funnel. In other words, if somebody searches a keyword, they start and they they want to like sort the results using Alexa. If they start interacting with Alexa and they click a product later, it is no longer counted in search query performance. It's going to disappear. So if people are using Alexa in like mass quantities after the search of a keyword, what would you see? A decrease in the number of clicks. Is that what we're seeing? Take a look at the data, guys. Again, for the most part, 2024, 2025, before and after Roffus, the number of clicks has been relatively the same. Uh it actually was peaking at the beginning of this year. Now, something interesting here, guys. This is too early to tell if there's a trend or not. When did Alexa replace Rufus? It was in May of this year. Look here at this big decrease in clicks in May of this year. So, it could be an indication that people started using Alexa more in the search results than they were using Rufus for. We don't know. Um I'm almost not sure because there was too much of a spike in clicks at the uh first part of this year. So this might have been just data kind of like evening out or it could indicate yeah that that more people are using Alexa than they were using Rufus. But still the point is even with this decreased amount of clicks it's still the same as it was last year in the year before. So again there has not been some huge behavioral difference amongst Amazon sellers that that's going to change the way that you guys optimize your listings. The next data point to look at if you're wondering has buyer behavior changed and that is looking at the conversion rate. Why? Because once people actually get to a product listing again, if they start interacting with Alexa, even if they buy the product after that, it's not going to count as a purchase. So, it's going to seem like conversion rate is worse for listings. Do we see that, guys? Take take a look at this chart right here. We did see a couple months, just two months this year of lower conversion rate. Uh, but for the for the most part, conversion rate has remained kind of steady. This is actually where I would expect more of a decrease in conversion because like even me, I use Alexa for Amazon when I'm on a page. I was just doing it today when I was looking for a new podcast microphone. My purchase, if I had made one, would not be counted under search performance. Why? Because I started using Alexa on the page itself. But even in that situation, guys, that has nothing to do per se with how you optimize your listing for search. But it does have to do with how you should optimize for the questions that come up in Alexa. And that's what I've been saying for two years. Don't ignore Alexa. You absolutely need to optimize your listings for Alexa. That's why even in Helium 10, in our listing builder AI, we have something where you can say, "Hey, make sure to uh answer the Alexa questions from my listing and my competitor's listings in my listing copy." But again, the narrative that people have been trying to push is that traditional search, traditional keywords are no longer important. And is that the case? No. It's just as relevant today as it was last year or two years ago because the same amount of people are searching and interacting with keywords in a similar way as before. Again, doesn't mean you need to ignore Alexa, but you have to keep this in mind. If you guys want to see uh more details of this report, make sure to go to the link that's in the description or go to h10.me/blog and and take a look at our recent blogs and and you'll see the article I wrote on this. Going now to seller central, there's an article that says use new pallet delivery ship option for your business customers. Did you ever think that directly from your warehouse, you can actually buy shipping to ship a full pallet of product to a customer? Now, of course, you could do that to Amazon, but now you are able to use Amazon shipping uh to ship to business customers like products that are over 500 lb or larger than 30 cubic feet and it has to deliver to a commercial address. And so if you've got a warehouse and you're, you know, moving some some product in bulk to Amazon business customers, which I highly recommend, advertising to Amazon business customers, you now can ship those directly, uh, using an FBM listing and buying shipping or postage, I don't know how you would call it, buying shipping directly from Amazon. Next up, we don't just have a new MCP uh, feature alert for uh, Helium 10. There's another new tool that has to do with keywords that Helium 10 has just released for the Chrome extension. Carrie, let us know what that is. >> All right, everyone. I'm so excited to bring you our latest new feature within Helium 10. And this is something that we've had quite a few people asking for, and it's really interesting data to be able to see on a product display page. And that is that you can see now your keyword tracker data on the display page through the Helium 10 at Chrome extension. So, I've already searched our Manny's Mysterious Oddities Coffin Shelf here, and I'm going to show you where you can find this data. The first thing you want to do is you're just going to scroll down to right about here. And you can see that we have keyword tracker right here. And so all the keywords that you're already tracking are going to show up on here and it's going to show the search volume, the organic rank, and the sponsored rank. If you wanted to maybe make some edits or changes or look a little bit into more details, you can click on open keyword tracker and it'll actually take you to keyword tracker so that you can make any edits or changes that you want there. Also, if you were like, oh, this is my biggest variation. I want to track this separately or maybe it's not your best variation. You want to track it separately. You can just push put track this separately and then you're going to add the keywords that you want to track separately and then that's what you can uh do to start tracking that individual variation separately. Okay, so that's the first thing. Now, what if you're not already tracking this particular product and with a keyword list? What you can do is I'm going to show you like for example here we've got this curio coffin shelf right here. And if you scroll down, this is actually not our product. So, we're not actually tracking it. So, it says track this product product to monitor keywords and rank over time. So, you can hit start tracking. Now, you can do this for yourself or your competitors. You can track whatever you want this way. And you're going to just enter your keyword list right here like you would in keyword tracker. And then you're going to hit save. And it'll show up in keyword tracker. And it'll also save here as well. That is basically what we're looking at here. It's just really helpful to be able to just kind of easily add things and take a look at your your organic rank for a lot of different keywords right on the display page. The level of subscription that this is for is for diamond and above. So diamond, elite, and enterprise. So those are the the levels that get access to this particular tool. It's one of our advanced tools. And keyword tracker, as you know, is one of our most popular tools. So if you haven't checked that out and started tracking, you definitely want to get in there and start tracking your keywords in keyword tracker. And then you'll be able to see them beautifully on the product display page through the Chrome extension. >> Thank you, Carrie. Last up, another announcement from Seller Central. Um, you can now see the different sessions at Amazon Accelerate 2026 in Seattle. It's going to be in September. We will be there and we've got a special discount code for anybody who wants to save money. So, if you go to h10.mme/acelerate, uh, register with your own seller central account. This is the premier event in the US to go to for Amazon sellers. Use the discount code helium comp. Helium seller co. No spaces there. and you'll be able to save money off of the regular ticket price. Go to h10.me/acelerate. I'll be speaking on stage there at Accelerate four different times. Carrie uh should be as well. We're going to have a booth. And don't forget, Accelerate is a great place to get your problems fixed with their seller cafe from Amazon where maybe there's something that seller support hasn't been able to to help you on. If you go to the seller cafe, a lot of people have been able to fix things that they weren't able to fix for a year or even more uh right there in the seller cafe. So, would love to see you in Seattle there in September. All right, guys. That's it for today. A lot going on, especially here at Helium 10. Thank you guys for tuning in, and we'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.