Amazon opens its ads to creators and its doors to AI agents

Everyone’s welcome on Amazon this week. Except the humans reading reviews.

Mark August 10 in red: Sponsored Products campaigns start appearing off Amazon through Influencer Programme creators.

Existing bids and budgets carry over, and you’re opted in by default.

Your levers are campaign-level offsite settings, creator exclusions, and deny lists. On placements with no search box, Amazon infers a search term for you.

So expect queries in your reports that no shopper ever typed.

The agents are back in the building: A US appeals court overturned the injunction blocking Perplexity’s shopping agents. The court ruled that users accessed Amazon, not Perplexity.

Perplexity’s own argument was that AI agents don’t have eyeballs to see Amazon’s advertising.

Meanwhile, real eyeballs are getting locked out: Amazon’s anti-scraping safeguards are flagging genuine shoppers as bots, capping them at eight reviews per product with no sorting or filtering.

Appeals take up to five business days. Ouch.

And in other eCom news, PayPal Ratenzahlung lands on Amazon.de and the app this month for 40M+ accounts, with exclusive 36- and 48-month terms.

Higher-ticket AOV just got easier in German-speaking markets.

And Walmart showed up with a wallet: It closed its reported $1.4B Vibe.co acquisition, buying self-serve streaming ad software built for small and midsize brands.

Amazon’s rewriting who gets in, what they see, and how they pay. Walmart’s busy building somewhere else to spend. And trying to get close to Amazon in the process… Interesting.

Search is adding doors, and most of them need keys

Bouncers at every entrance, and your tracking tools aren’t on the guest list.

Prove you’re human, but properly this time: Google is testing a sign-in prompt instead of a captcha for searchers who go past the first few pages.

It’s limited for now. But if it sticks, rank trackers and SERP scrapers lose their view of anything deep in the results. If that sounds concerning… it kind of is. For SEOs especially.

Same wall, other side: From September 15, Cloudflare will block mixed-purpose crawlers under any AI training block. Googlebot counts as mixed-purpose.

One site owner reports 403s on their sitemap already. Audit your bot settings before that date, or you might block the crawler you don’t want to. Urgh.

Wrong lever, wrong door: Blocking Google-Extended does nothing for AI Overviews, where Top Stories now sits on 15.5% of US trending news queries.

The Search Console generative AI exclusion is the control that actually reaches it. Most publishers are pulling the other one.

Can’t watch the SERP? Watch the citations: Microsoft Clarity now splits branded from non-branded AI queries, so you can separate brand demand from generic discovery.

And paid didn’t get the memo: Google Ads is testing keyword-rich anchor text inside ad descriptions, pointing to the same landing page as the headline.

Organic access keeps narrowing while paid keeps handing out more places to click. Fun times.

Calling customers by name is worth 17% more per order

Science Says dug into a Monash University study on what happens when service staff use a customer’s name.

Turns out it isn’t just a nicety. It’s revenue.

The numbers are almost annoyingly good. Across a field experiment at an Australian restaurant and three online tests, customers who got called by name spent 17.3% more per head, from $28.67 up to $33.64.

Upsell acceptance more than doubled, from 22.6% to 48.4%. Satisfaction climbed 15.9%.

Free tactic without new ad spend or no creative refresh. Rare.

Timing beats frequency. Dropping a name at a random point in the conversation lifted upsell acceptance by 17.2%.

Bolting it onto the upsell itself did nothing. The moment a name feels like a sales lever, it stops working like one.

Introductions cut both ways. The effect gets stronger when the employee gives their own name before asking for the customer’s. Use that.

But be careful because there’s a hard ceiling on repetition:

• Every other sentence: satisfaction up 9.1%.
• Every sentence: the gain vanishes, and people get uncomfortable.

If your script says “use the name,” your script is already wrong.

Read the room before you read the name. At a pharmacy counter buying hemorrhoid cream, hearing your name is the opposite of flattering. The effect completely reverses.

Anywhere customers want privacy, stop it.

The open question is chat: Researchers tested scripts and in-person service, not live chat or support tickets. The mechanism should stay similar, making people feel like a person instead of a ticket number, but nobody’s proven it.

And of course, don’t expect AI support and chat to get it right.

One more limitation to be aware of: The study covered the US, UK, and Australia, and didn’t separate first names from Mr. Smith.

So, perhaps a 20-year-old doesn’t want a title, and an older customer may not want a teenager using his first name.

B2B buyers are locked in even when they’re not at work

The 9-to-5 is a myth.

B2B buyers are surprisingly active content consumers outside of office hours. Market trends are the top draw, with 44% of buyers engaging with them in their personal time.

This is followed by news and current events (38%), success stories (29%), and product reviews (28%).

Even educational content holds its own, with 24% of buyers willing to learn on their own time. But that means your content needs to be engaging enough to compete with Netflix.

The Crew’s take: The “professional/personal” divide is dead. Your buyers are always on. If your content is too dry for Sunday afternoon reading, you’re missing a massive window of high-intent attention.

Optimize your content for mobile and “snackable” formats. Think newsletters, carousels, or short podcasts that buyers can consume while commuting or relaxing, too.