Amazon ranking glossary

Definitions for the vocabulary used across this site, including several terms that are used loosely elsewhere and one that Amazon has never used at all.

Organic rank

A product's position in Amazon's unpaid search results for a specific search query. It is query-specific: a product has a different organic rank for every keyword. Amazon publishes no organic rank data, so every figure you see comes from third-party scraping. How it is determined →

Indexing

Whether a product is retrievable for a query at all — the first of Amazon's two ranking stages. Being indexed makes you eligible to appear; it says nothing about position. How to check it →

Retrieval

The stage that determines eligibility. It combines lexical keyword matching against your indexed text fields with semantic, embedding-based matching trained on customer behaviour. Amazon confirmed Amazon Science has published extensively on the semantic half.

Best Sellers Rank (BSR)

A product's sales volume relative to its category, updated hourly. Amazon states that both recent and all-time sales factor in, with recent sales counting more, and that BSR is not influenced by page views or customer reviews. It has no query attached and is not comparable across categories. BSR versus keyword rank →

Amazon confirmed Amazon: “A top BSR doesn’t always equal a high organic search ranking, and a high organic ranking isn’t guaranteed to have a high BSR score.”

Rank juice

Industry shorthand for the idea that sponsored sales transfer ranking benefit to organic position. Amazon has never used the term or claimed the mechanism. A plausible indirect effect exists — ads produce real clicks and purchases, and behaviour drives ranking — but no credible study has isolated or quantified it. The evidence →

Contested Any tool claiming to measure rank juice is modelling it. Amazon reports no organic-lift-from-ads metric, and Search Query Performance does not split organic from sponsored.

Sales velocity

The rate of sales over a recent period, as opposed to cumulative sales. “Sales” is a named intrinsic feature in Amazon's 2016 ranking paper, and recency-weighting is officially documented for BSR specifically. Extending recency-weighted velocity to keyword rank is reasonable inference rather than documentation.

Honeymoon period

An industry term for a supposed time-boxed visibility boost for new listings. Amazon has never documented it. What the evidence supports instead is cold-start handling, where a product with no behavioural history is scored on priors derived from similar items until its own data replaces them. Why the difference matters →

Contested No Amazon announcement, help page or publication uses the term.

Cold start

The standard machine-learning problem of scoring an item with no interaction history. Amazon's approach uses prior prediction values derived from similar products, progressively replaced by posterior values through Bayesian updating on the product's own clicks, views and purchases. This is the real mechanism the “honeymoon period” is a folk description of.

A9

A genuine Amazon subsidiary founded in 2003 that built product search. Amazon took down the A9.com site in 2019 and absorbed the organisation into Amazon Search. Calling the current system “the A9 algorithm” is anachronistic. The naming, settled →

A10

Not an Amazon system. Never announced, absent from all Amazon documentation, patents and publications, and carrying no version number. Industry coinage from around 2019–2020.

Contested If an article gives you a numbered, weighted list of “A10 ranking factors,” it is inventing them.

COSMO

A real Amazon system documented at SIGMOD 2024: a pipeline that generates commonsense knowledge about how people think about and use products, distilled from large language models and filtered by classifiers trained on human annotations. Amazon states it is deployed in search applications, particularly search navigation. Its weight in core ranking is not public.

Search Query Performance (SQP)

A Brand Analytics report giving a four-stage funnel per search query — impressions, clicks, basket adds, purchases — each with total count, your brand's count and your brand share, plus search query volume and a Search Query Score. The closest thing to ground truth Amazon provides.

Three limits worth knowing: it only covers queries where your brand appeared, purchase totals will not reconcile with your sales reports because it counts only search-originated purchases, and it does not split organic from sponsored.

Featured Offer (Buy Box)

The offer that wins the add-to-cart button on a detail page. Selected on competitive pricing, delivery speed and performance metrics. Losing it removes the standard purchase path and collapses conversion, which is how it affects ranking. Amazon began removing seller eligibility requirements for the Featured Offer in July 2026.

Search-find-buy (SFB)

A scheme in which incentivised buyers search a target keyword, locate the product and purchase it, to simulate organic search demand. Amazon's enforcement language names this almost verbatim — “incentivizing customers' searches to appear as organic behavior” — with account deactivation within 72 hours as the stated consequence. Since October 2024 there is also separate FTC exposure of up to $53,088 per violation.

Amazon confirmed This is not a grey area. It is named in the policy text.

Item Highlights

A product field introduced alongside the July 2026 title changes, carrying up to 125 characters for materials, recommended use cases and comparison information. Amazon stated on 30 July 2026 that Item Name and Item Highlights are both inputs for search with neither prioritised. It began displaying beside titles in search results on 10 August 2026.

Brand Referral Bonus

A programme that credits brand owners roughly 10% of qualifying sales driven by their own external traffic, offsetting future referral fees. Requires a Professional plan, Brand Registry and Amazon Attribution tags. It is Amazon paying you for compliant off-Amazon traffic — the legitimate counterpart to the incentivised-traffic tactics it prohibits.