E-commerce giant Amazon is scraping content from external websites to boost its product listings, with hopes to become the leading source of product information online, according to documents seen by Business Insider.
Amazon’s AI-powered project, titled “Starfish”, is a multi-year Gen AI initiative, which includes using LLMs to gather vast amounts of product information from over 200,000 external brand websites, to generate hyper-accurate product listings.
The AI tool will scrape brand websites and map content to Amazon’s online catalog. The giant said it expects the new product listing format to improve conversion rates and expand the number of products on its website.
Starfish is reportedly set to give the company a $7.5 billion boost this year alone.
Amazon is using Starfish to support its “Buy For Me” offering – letting customers view products from external websites and purchase them within the Amazon platform. This may signal the giant wants to become a centralised database for all products online.
Amazon has been working to automate the product listing process for sellers. Since 2023, this has included using AI to generate third-party product listings, product images and video ads, and to update product titles and descriptions that aren’t as relevant.
Becoming a Product Database?
Improving the descriptions of products might seem insignificant, but has some long-term consequences for Amazon, and all online retailers, in the age of AI.
Amazon’s move to improve product listings hints that reliable and accurate listings are more likely to drive sales. Gen AI can help in generating this content so consumers can find products more easily.
Through enriching its own product titles and descriptions – and essentially building a global product database – Amazon products will likely be well-received by AI crawlers and agents.
This means products from its website will be favoured and appear more frequently in chatbot query answers, and get picked up by shopping agents, leading to increased discovery and sales for the giant.
