Sam Shah, Author at Desverto

Does A+ Content improve organic rankings? Not directly it does not get indexed as a keyword field on Amazon It never has. But it can still move your rank, just not the way most of the advice floating around actually explains. The two camps arguing about this online are both partly right, and the confusion comes from mixing up two different questions: does A+ text get crawled for search relevance, and does A+ Content change your rank at all? Those are not the same question, and most articles on this topic answer one while pretending to answer the other. Why the Evidence on A+ Content and Organic Rankings Conflicts Search "does A+ Content improve rankings" and you'll find three different answers, each defended by people who sound equally confident. That's not because the topic is unusually murky. It's because Amazon has never published how its ranking algorithm weighs anything, so every claim about A+ Content and SEO is an inference from correlation, not a confirmed mechanism. Three positions show up repeatedly. Direct indexing. A minority of sellers and agencies argue that A+ Content, especially image alt text, gets crawled and contributes to keyword relevance. The evidence here is mostly "I changed my A+ Content and my rank improved," which is a real observation but not proof of cause. Indirect conversion impact. The majority position, and the one with the strongest paper trail, is that A+ Content doesn't touch keyword indexing at all. It improves conversion rate, dwell time, and return rate. Amazon's algorithm rewards listings that convert well, so better A+ Content can raise your rank over time through sales performance, not through any text Amazon is reading for relevance. Behavioral and AI signals. A smaller, newer argument says the first two camps are both asking the wrong question. Amazon's shopping experience increasingly runs on AI systems (its COSMO product knowledge graph and the Rufus shopping assistant) that use structured product data differently than the classic A9 search algorithm does. Under this view, A+ Content might matter for how Amazon's AI understands your product, even if it never touches keyword search. Claim Who argues it Evidence quality Verdict A+ text/alt text is directly indexed for keyword search A minority of sellers and a handful of agencies Weak: correlational, mostly anecdotal, often from parties selling A+ design services Not supported by anything Amazon has published A+ Content improves rank indirectly through conversion The majority of agencies and Amazon's own stated conversion figures Moderate to strong: matches Amazon's public messaging and known ranking factors like sales velocity The best-supported position available A+ Content feeds AI shopping systems (COSMO, Rufus) independent of search indexing A small number of more technical sources Emerging: based on Amazon's own published research on its knowledge graph, not yet widely tested by sellers Plausible and worth watching, not yet proven at the seller level The honest summary: nobody outside Amazon can prove exactly why A+ Content correlates with better rank when it does. What's provable is that it correlates with better conversion, and conversion is a documented ranking input. What Amazon Officially Says Amazon has never claimed A+ Content is a ranking factor. Its own Seller Central materials describe A+ Content strictly as a way to give shoppers richer product information, and the numbers Amazon publishes are about sales, not search position. Amazon representatives have cited Basic A+ Content lifting sales up to 8% and Premium A+ up to 20% in Seller Central discussions and help documentation. Read that language carefully. It says "sales," not "search rank." Amazon's silence on the direct-indexing question is not evidence that indexing happens quietly in the background. It's just silence, and sellers have filled that silence with whatever theory fits their own results. Camp 1: The Direct-Indexing Argument The case for direct indexing usually goes like this: alt text on A+ Content images get crawled by Amazon's system the same way title and bullet text do, so keywords placed there should count toward relevance. Sellers who've rewritten their alt text and then watched their rank climb treat that as confirmation. The problem is timing. Conversion-driven ranking changes on Amazon typically show up over days or weeks, not instantly, which means a seller who updates alt text and also happens to be mid-way through a normal sales ramp will see the same "proof" regardless of whether alt text did anything. Nobody in this camp has published a controlled test that isolates alt text changes from every other variable moving at the same time (reviews accumulating, PPC spend changing, seasonality). I've seen sellers rewrite their alt text and swear their rank moved because of it, when their PPC spend also jumped that same week and nobody isolated which change actually did the work. That's the pattern behind most of the direct-indexing claims out there. It's also worth flagging where this argument tends to come from. Several of the loudest voices for direct indexing are agencies that sell A+ Content design services, which gives them a reason to want the "it directly boosts SEO" story to be true. That doesn't make them wrong. It does mean the claim deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets. Camp 2: The Indirect-Conversion Argument This is the position with the most going for it, and it's worth explaining the actual mechanism instead of just repeating "conversion helps rank." Amazon's ranking system rewards listings that turn browsers into buyers. If your A+ Content answers objections a shopper would otherwise have (sizing, ingredients, compatibility, use cases) before they bounce to a competitor, your conversion rate goes up. Higher conversion on the same traffic means more units sold per session, which is sales velocity. Sales velocity is one of the ranking inputs Amazon has acknowledged, even if it's never published the exact weighting. Here's what that looks like with real numbers. A product doing $30,000 a month at a 9% conversion rate is converting roughly 1 in 11 visitors. If well-built A+ Content (comparison charts, ingredient callouts, a clear use-case breakdown) pushes that to 13%, you're not getting a 4% revenue bump. You're getting a 44% lift in units sold from the same traffic, with no increase in ad spend. That's the kind of sales velocity change Amazon's algorithm actually responds to. This is also why results take time. A+ Content doesn't change your rank on publish day. It changes your conversion rate, and the algorithm needs weeks of that improved conversion data before it adjusts your position. If you want the full mechanism. Anyone promising a fast SEO win from A+ Content is describing something that doesn't match how Amazon's system actually works. The New Variable: Amazon's Alt-Text Changes Most of what has been written about whether A+ Content improves organic rankings predates a massive shift in how Amazon handles image metadata. Amazon has decoupled A+ alt text from its direct keyword indexing signals. For years, sellers built their SEO strategies around hand-writing keyword-rich alt text into A+ modules to "shadow index" for terms hidden from the front end. Today, that lever no longer works for search rankings; Amazon's search algorithm and AI tools now prioritize on-page structured text, titles, and actual image asset analysis over hidden backend alt text. Furthermore, Amazon's updated policies and automated systems have transformed how this data is managed: Strict Accessibility Standards: In major marketplaces like the US, manual alt text remains a requirement, but Amazon enforces strict compliance. Submitting strings of unreadable, stuffed keywords instead of a genuine description for visually impaired shoppers can trigger immediate A+ module rejections. Automated AI Rollouts: In several regional marketplaces, Amazon has begun testing or fully implementing generative AI tools that auto-populate image descriptions or completely restrict manual seller inputs in favor of automated image recognition. Sellers who built their SEO strategies entirely around manual alt-text keyword stuffing must pivot. This algorithmic shift effectively undercuts the classic direct-indexing argument, meaning optimization efforts should focus entirely on writing compliant, descriptive alt text for accessibility while shifting heavy keyword strategies to titles, bullets, and standard backend search terms. The AI-Shopping Angle: COSMO, Rufus, and Behavioral Signals Amazon's search box is no longer the only way shoppers find products on the platform. Rufus, Amazon's AI shopping assistant, and the underlying COSMO product knowledge graph pull from structured product data to answer shopper questions and make recommendations, and Amazon has published research describing how COSMO works. The argument here isn't that A+ Content gets indexed for search. It's that well-structured, information-dense A+ modules may feed these newer AI systems in ways that have nothing to do with the A9 algorithm most SEO advice is still built around. A comparison chart or a clear ingredient breakdown might help Rufus answer a shopper's question accurately, which is a different kind of visibility than ranking for a keyword. This part of the debate is genuinely new, and treating it as settled would be dishonest. What's fair to say: if Amazon's shopping experience keeps shifting toward AI-generated answers instead of ranked search results, structured, accurate A+ Content becomes more valuable for reasons that have nothing to do with the indexing debate everyone's been having. Myth vs. Fact Myth Fact "A+ Content boosts your keyword rankings directly." Amazon has never confirmed A+ text is indexed for keyword search. The lift, when it happens, comes through conversion. "If A+ Content doesn't help SEO, it's not worth building." It's still a proven conversion lever (up to 8% Basic, up to 20% Premium per Amazon's own figures), and conversion is a ranking input in its own right. "Premium A+ Content ranks better than Basic A+ Content." Tier affects conversion lift potential, not indexing status. Neither tier gets crawled for keywords differently. "Adding more keywords into A+ modules is free SEO." If A+ text isn't indexed, stuffing keywords into it does nothing for rank and can hurt readability, which hurts conversion instead. "You'll see a rank change right after publishing new A+ Content." Conversion-driven rank changes take weeks of sales data to show up. Anything faster isn't A+ Content working. Does A+ Content Improve Organic Rankings? What This Means for Your Listing If you're deciding whether to invest more in A+ Content, the direct-indexing debate shouldn't be the deciding factor. Here's the order that actually matches the evidence. First, treat A+ Content as a conversion project, not a keyword project. Build it around the objections your specific shoppers have (sizing, compatibility, ingredient sourcing, use cases), not around cramming in secondary keywords. Second, fix your titles, bullets, and backend search terms before you touch A+ Content. Those fields are confirmed indexed. A+ Content is not. Spending A+ effort on a listing with weak fundamentals is optimizing the wrong layer first. Third, if you're deciding between Basic and Premium A+, base it on your product's price point and consideration cycle, not on any SEO promise. Premium's higher conversion ceiling (up to 20% versus up to 8%) matters more for considered purchases where shoppers compare options before buying. Fourth, measure conversion rate and sessions before and after any A+ Content change, and give it at least three to four weeks before drawing conclusions. Anything shorter gets swamped by normal sales noise. Fifth, if your marketplace has moved to auto-generated alt text, stop treating hand-written alt text as a keyword lever and start treating your product images and copy as the place that keyword relevance actually lives. If you're still wondering whether your own A+ Content is doing anything for rank or is just built to check a box, our A+ Content team can walk through your listing and tell you where the gaps are.

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