Is Amazon hiding your best keywords from search?

This This is the Billiondoll Sellers podcast. Your go-to source for cutting edge strategies and success stories from the world of Amazon and e-commerce. Buckle up and get ready to take your Amazon business to new heights. Don't forget to subscribe to the Billiondoll Sellers Newsletter. Welcome your host. >> Welcome your host, Kevin King. >> Hey everyone, welcome to the Billiondollar Sellers podcast. I'm your host, Kevin King, and today is Thursday, September 24th, 2026. So, we've got a packed one for you today. And I want to start with the story behind the title this week. Amazon has quietly been pulling brand names out of your title in search, and now it's using AI to rewrite titles for length, so your single best keyword can just vanish from the listing without you ever touching a thing. One seller watched their sales drop from $1,400 to $800 in a single day because of it. But we've also got Walmart's listing scorecard and how to actually win there. Google's new report that shows how you show up when shoppers ask AI instead of typing a free tool that shows your listing exactly the way an AI agent sees it and a few more hot picks. So, let's get into it. All right, so before we get going, here's today's Stump Bezos question. So, over $1 trillion is expected to be spent this holiday season here in the US. What percentage of shoppers research their gifts before October 21st? Think about it and I'll give you the answer at the end of the show. Okay, first up, the big one, and this is the story behind the title. One seller watched their daily sales fall from $1,400 to $800 in a single day. Their conversion rate dropped to under 15%. They found the cause, fixed it in 30 minutes, and the next day, conversion hit 28% with sales back up to around $1,575. And the cause was this. Amazon pulled their brand name out of the title in the search results, and their brand name was also their main keyword. So, this isn't new, but it's getting worse. Amazon has been quietly testing this for a few years. Sellers were reporting it in the seller central forums back in 2022 and 2023, and Amazon reps confirmed they were testing a new approach that removes less recognizable brand names to bring the key customer search terms to the front. What's changed recently is the mechanism doing the damage got a lot bigger. On July 27th of this year, Amazon rolled out a hard 75 character title limit across every category except media, and it started using AI to autorewite any title that goes over. There's a new item highlights field now that absorbs the overflow up to 125 characters of specs and use cases, but the AI decides what survives in the title itself. and reporting since the roll out shows listings that ranked page one for buyer intent keywords falling off the first page entirely once Amazon's AI rewrote the title because the AI has no idea which specific words were actually driving your sales. So, put those two things together, an algorithm that already strips brand names it doesn't recognize, now paired with an AI actively rewriting titles for length, and you've got more ways than ever for a keyword to disappear from your listing without you touching anything. And here's why you won't see it coming. Your backend title never changes. Seller Central still shows your full title exactly as you wrote it. So, the title you wrote and the title shoppers actually see can be two completely different things. The only place the missing word shows up is the live search results page and the sponsored ad placements, which most sellers never screenshot or check side by side with their backend. And if you built your main keyword right into your brand name on purpose, the way a seller like InMotion Hemp did with the word hemp, Amazon can drop the brand and the keyword together, and nothing in your dashboard flags it. So, here's your 5-minute check today. Search your top keyword on Amazon, find your own listing, and compare what's shown there to your actual backend title. Do the same thing on your phone because mobile truncates differently than desktop. If your brand name doubles as a core keyword, check whether it's even showing at all. And check your sponsored brands placements, too, not just the organic results. If your brand and your best keyword are the same word, this is genuinely worth 5 minutes of your day because it costs that seller a full day of sales before they caught it. All right, next up, let's talk Walmart. Because Amazon hides how it scores you, but Walmart basically hands you the rubric and most sellers still fail it. And that's exactly why a well-built listing can outrank a bigger competitor over there in a way it just can't on Amazon. So Carrie Miller of Helium 10 and Michael Labar of Cellcord, that's the agency behind more than 6 billion in Walmart revenue, laid out the whole scorecard on a recent BDSC call. First, set your expectations. A healthy Amazon brand putting in basic effort should see roughly 10 to 15% of its Amazon revenue on Walmart. But if you're struggling on Amazon, Walmart is not going to rescue you. And the categories are lopsided. Home and hard lines, so fitness, furniture, decor, bath, those are wide open because brand loyalty is thin. Food, consumables, and health are brutal because shoppers are just buying the same national brands they've bought in store for years. Carrie's storage products did well over there. Her socks never had a chance against Hannes at rock bottom prices. Clear the bar and you become eligible for the proseller badge, which is a set number of orders in 90 days plus strong quality scores. Shoppers actually filter for it. So, it's a real visibility jump. Now, here's the thing to understand about that score. Walmart grades every listing on five things, and the score directly controls your visibility. So, a higher score literally gets you seen by more shoppers. Two big ones to focus on, content quality, where keyword stuffed titles get suppressed outright, and price, where Walmart runs a meterbeat check against your Amazon price and will even partner with you on commission discounts to help you hit it. So, let's talk about the launch sequence. Put your most important keyword first in the title, right after the brand name. Michael called that the single biggest ranking lever on the whole platform and then you stop. No stuffing. Then check your right to win before you spend a dollar. Pull the search insights report from seller center and look at the top three to five converting items for your keyword. If they look like your product and price and type, go for it. But if they're $4.99 national brands with 1-hour delivery and you're a 1999 specialty item, pick a different keyword and understand the algorithm. Walmart ranks on conversion rate more than raw volume. So irrelevant wellpriced item can beat a much bigger seller. Search is also getting more personalized which makes keyword rank tracking unreliable. So track your sales rank within your product type instead. Advertise from day one. Most of the top positions are ads, same as Amazon. The auto campaigns have improved a lot and that's where a lot of sellers win early and Walmart's auction rewards relevance over bid size. so a relevant item with a lower bid can still take the spot and drive outside traffic. Generate a URL with your target keyword in it. Set up a publisher account through Impact for trackable affiliate links. And Walmart even discounts your commission when you run Google ads through their platform. Now, reviews the fast way. Syndicate the reviews from your own Shopify site over to Walmart on day one. It's allowed. It's built right in and it's the quickest way to stop looking brand new. Then use Walmart's post-purchase review request program, which runs about $10 a review, plus the sample program for early volume. And here's one hack worth stealing. Want a competitor sales rank? Add their item to your catalog as a reseller and you'll see their rank right next to yours in the back end. So why do some sellers net more over here? Fewer of those incremental fees. Amazon keeps adding commission incentive programs for deals and a lot less aggressive competition in many categories. One Helium 10 product manager actually makes more profit on Walmart than on Amazon on lower revenue. And if you're already set up over there, fix the title, turn on Walmart fulfillment services, and syndicate your reviews. That's honestly an afternoon of work. The full call also covered the path from marketplace all the way to Walmart's 4600 stores, packaging for the shelf, and financing the purchase orders. It's all inside the billiondoll Sellers Club, and you can try it for $9 at billiondollscellers.com. All right, quick word from a partner and this one is dragon.fish whose whole pitch is that your most profitable channel is the one you're starving and that's email. So, there are two things worth pulling out of it. The first is warming up the list you already have where they clean it up, fix your deliverability, and say you can add 20 to 40% to your topline revenue without buying a single new customer. And the second is marketplace capture because Amazon and Walmart don't hand you customer contact data and they say they can get you emails on 30 to 60% of those buyers so you can actually market to them for launches and repeat orders. There's a link in the show notes if you want to take a look. Okay, next up is one you got to see and it's a video from the Marketing Misfits podcast called Targeted by the FTC. The $56 million comeback story. So imagine you build a hyperrowth digital marketing agency from 0 to $56 million in 2 years and then you wake up one morning to find your bank accounts frozen by the Federal Trade Commission. This episode features Mary D, a highlevel business adviser and self-proclaimed chief fund officer and she shares this harrowing journey of losing millions to an FTC civil lawsuit while battling breast cancer at the exact same time. She breaks down the shades of gray and digital marketing compliance. Why scaling too fast puts a massive target on your back. And how shifting your definition of retirement can save you from entrepreneurial burnout. If you sell information products, run multiple LLC entities, or you struggle to delegate control to your team, this one is a wake-up call. There's a link in the show notes, and you can subscribe to the Marketing Misfits newsletter there, too. All right, let's look at some interesting stats this week. And this one is about how commercial intent is turning Chat GPT into a shopping channel that brands can't track. So, comparing June of 2025 to June of 2026, the first thing that jumps out is that commercial conversations climb from about 13.9% to 19.2% of the total. People are shifting from asking chat GPT to help them make things to asking it to help them buy things. And the second thing is that generative use dropped from 46% down to about 39.6% over that same stretch whileformational held steady right around 40%. So the buying share is growing at the expense of the creating share and that's off a sample of 7.5 million conversations. Okay, next up, Google just gave merchants visibility into something they've never been able to see before, which is how your products actually show up when shoppers ask AI questions instead of typing search terms. So, there's a new tab inside Google Merchant Center that shows your product visibility across AI mode, the Gemini app, and AI overviews. And this is organic AI visibility only, no paid ads, and no click data. You'll find it under the analytics tab, then products, then the AI performance tab. For now, it's English language queries only in the US, Australia, Canada, India, and New Zealand. And it tracks three things. Share a voice, which is your brand's visibility versus total shopper demand and similar competitors. journey stages, which is where you show up across discovery, evaluation, and purchase, and product terms and attributes, so which conversational themes like easy setup, and which spec searches like color and weight are surfacing your products. On those journey stages, there's a really clean way to think about it. In discovery, you're showing up in broad, open-ended questions, and the fix is cleaning up your product type hierarchy and your category mapping. In evaluation, you're landing in comparison grids and top three lists. And the fix there is filling out complete specs and clear differentiators. And why this matters is simple. Shoppers are increasingly asking AI, "What's the best waterproof hiking boot?" instead of just searching waterproof hiking boots. This report finally shows you whether you're even in that conversation. So, the actual fix is to rewrite your feed for conversation, not keywords. Cuz AI shopping doesn't match keywords, it matches context. There are three moves. Max out every attribute field. So color, material, size, pattern, gender, because Gemini filters dynamically off those. Kill the keyword stuffed titles. So something like shoes trail run black men's becomes breathable, waterproof trail running shoes, and write the use case into your description. So IPX7 waterproof rating becomes safe for backyard pool parties and camping trips. Just to show you the pattern, a hiking boot spec that reads Gortex lining, viram soul, brown and black, becomes built for wet, rocky trails, and multi-day backpacking. Breathable lining keeps your feet dry in heavy rain. Same product. Totally different way of describing it. So, there are three rules to apply across your whole catalog. Lead with where, when, and how it's used, not the spec. Give every spec a human payoff. So, don't just say IPX7. Say why that actually matters. And drop in natural lifestyle phrases like travel friendly, pet safe, or office approved. And here's what to do today. Pull your top 10 SKs, rewrite the descriptions using that pattern, and then check back in the AI performance tab in a few weeks to see if your share of voice actually moves. All right, today's software tool of the day lets you see your listing exactly how AI agents see it, and it's called Shop Cat Explorer. So, every seller obsesses over how their listing looks to a human shopper, but almost nobody checks how it looks to an AI agent. And that gap is exactly why you want to try this. Shopify built a catalog API that feeds product data straight to AI shopping agents. It's public. It's documented. And now there's a free tool that lets anyone see exactly what that API is handing over. If you sell on Shopify or compete with brands that do, it's worth 10 minutes today. So, you pop in a store, a brand, or a product, and it splits into four panes. The one that matters is the product detail pane. for any skew. It shows you the description and inferred attributes Shopify's AI is generating on your behalf, review scores when they're there, and every variant it's returning. And it runs an agent visibility check across six fields. So, image, description, price, skew, rating, and compare it price. Miss any single one of those, and Shopify flags the listing as not fully visible to agents. Search a brand name and you'll see every store carrying that brand ranked by relevance exactly the way an agent would get it. Search a category and you'll see the whole competitive field. Try flip-flop heels if you want to see how deep it goes. 346 core SKs across 136 stores all ranked and why this matters more than it looks. Shopify has spent 2 years building a search index covering over a billion products and it's already grouping near duplicate listings across stores under a single universal product ID which is basically their version of an as. And to put the scale in perspective, there are about 1.1 million active US Shopify stores, but the money follows a power law. So, a small slice of stores drives the vast majority of it. Their 2026 US sales are projected around $265 billion with roughly $212 billion of that concentrated right at the top. So, if your listing is missing pieces, thin on attributes, or getting clustered with the wrong variant, an agent may never surface you at all, or worse, it surfaces you under somebody else's pricing. Aenic Commerce is coming for Shopify sellers the same way it's coming for Amazon. And this tool lets you check your exposure before it becomes a problem. All right, let's run through a few more hot picks worth your time this week. So, there's a look at the threat that AI agent instinct and Meta's Muse pose to Amazon. On the flip side, Amazon is now blocking Meta's Muse Aenic AI from shopping its site. Shopify is filtering out bots to show human-only traffic to stores. And there's a projection that AI search could drive $750 billion by 2028, which means your listings are going to need to change. There are links to all of those in the show notes. And for today's parting shot, here's one from James Clear. He said, "Concent concentration produces wealth. Diversification protects wealth." And I like that one because you build the thing by going all in on one channel, but you keep the thing by making sure you're never at the mercy of any single one of them. All right. And remember that Stump Bezos question from the top of the show. So I asked, "What percentage of shoppers research their gifts before October 21st out of that trillion dollar holiday season?" And the answer is 33%. So a full third of shoppers are already doing their homework before late October, which means your Q4 window to fix listings and get discovered isn't coming. It's already here. And that's it for today, folks. Have a great weekend and I'll see you again on Monday. This is Kevin King signing off from the Billiondollar Sellers podcast.