How much of Amazon's first page is ads?

A Consumers' Checkbook study of 50 searches found that on average 54 percent of the first 25 results were sponsored, and more than 70 percent for some searches. Even when a brand name was included in the search, 44 percent of results were ads, and 35 percent were ads for other brands.

Why do Amazon brands have random-letter names?

Since 2017 Amazon's Brand Registry has required a registered or pending trademark. A made-up string like QWERTYX clears the trademark office quickly because nothing else resembles it, so a gibberish name is the cheapest ticket to Brand Registry and the search advantages it brings.

What can I do about bad Amazon search results?

Search more specifically, use the brand filter in the left sidebar, click a brand name before you trust it, and ignore the percentage next to a struck-through List Price on a brand you do not recognise. A browser extension such as ClearCart hides sponsored placements, made-up brands and copycat listings on the results page itself, with a reason on every hidden listing and one click to bring it back.

Why is Amazon search so bad now?

Q: Why is Amazon search so bad now?

Four things changed. About half of the first page is now paid placement rather than the best match. Amazon's Brand Registry made a registered trademark the ticket to better search placement, so sellers register made-up words, which is why page one is full of brands like VGEBY and ZQXWK. The same product is relisted under many of those names so it takes several slots instead of one. And titles are written for the ranking algorithm, not for people, so they became 200-character keyword lists.

October 3, 2026 · It is not your imagination, and it is not an accident. Four separate decisions, each sensible for someone, add up to the page you see.

Type "phone charger" into Amazon and you get a wall of listings from brands you have never heard of, half of them marked Sponsored, most with titles longer than this paragraph, several of them the same product with a different sticker. Ten years ago the same search returned Anker, Belkin, and Amazon Basics in the first row. People notice, and "why is Amazon search so bad" is now a search term in its own right. Here is the honest answer, one cause at a time, with what you can do about each.

1. Half of page one is paid placement

54% of the first 25 results were sponsored, on average, across 50 ordinary searches. For some searches it was over 70%. Adding a brand name to the search still gave 44% ads, and 35% of those were ads for other brands. (Consumers' Checkbook, 50-query study)

Amazon's advertising business made about $68 billion in 2025, more than its entire subscription business, and almost all of it is sponsored placements sold against search terms. Every ad slot on the results page is a slot the best-matching product does not get. That is not a side effect; it is the product. The FTC's 2023 antitrust complaint quotes internal documents in which executives acknowledged that the volume of ads made it "almost impossible for high quality, helpful organic content to win over barely relevant sponsored content," and describes a direction from the top to "accept more defects," defects being ads that do not match the search (CNBC). Amazon disputes the FTC's framing; the ad share of the page is not in dispute.

What this means for you: the first row is not the best match, it is the highest bid. The sponsored tag is small, grey and easy to stop seeing. Train yourself to see it.

2. The brands are trademark filings

Since 2017, a registered or pending trademark has been the ticket into Amazon's Brand Registry, which unlocks better listing tools, protection from hijackers and, in practice, better placement. Real words and real names get rejected by the trademark office for resembling something that already exists. A string like QWERTYX sails through, because nothing else is like it. So the cheapest path to Brand Registry is to invent a word, and tens of thousands of sellers did (The Hustle on the trademark surge). That is why page one reads like a cat walked across a keyboard. The names are not bad branding. They were never meant to be brands.

What this means for you: a brand name you cannot pronounce is not automatically junk, but it is a brand with no reputation to lose. Click the name. A real company has a product line that makes sense. A storefront selling a phone case, a dog leash and a meat thermometer is a warehouse with a trademark. We wrote the full story in Why do Amazon brands have such weird names?

3. The same product is listed six times

Once one made-up brand is cheap, six are nearly free. The same item from the same factory gets listed under six names, each with its own photos, its own reviews and its own slot on page one. Where a search used to show you twenty products, it now shows you eight products wearing twenty names. The listings are not competing with each other; they are crowding out the one product you would have found. Sometimes the copies even share a review pool, so a two-week-old listing shows up with 40,000 ratings earned by something else (how that works).

What this means for you: if three listings share the same photo and the same oddly specific title with the words shuffled, they are one product. Pick the cheapest or skip all three; comparing them is a waste of time.

4. Titles are written for the ranking algorithm, not for you

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Amazon's ranking rewards the words in a title that match what people type. So titles became lists of every word anyone might type, and the product name appears once in position four. This is not laziness. It works, and the sellers who do not do it lose to the ones who do. The result is a results page where you cannot tell what anything is without opening it.

What this means for you: the title is the weakest signal on the page. Read the brand, the review count and the unit price first; read the title last, if at all.

Why it will not fix itself

Every one of these four things makes Amazon money or costs it nothing. Ads are its fastest-growing business. Brand Registry solved a real counterfeiting problem and is not going away. Clone listings each pay their own fees. Keyword titles are the sellers' problem to write and Amazon's benefit to rank. Amazon has made real moves against the worst of it, including a 2026 tightening of how struck-through "typical prices" are calculated, but nobody inside the system has an incentive to give you back the page you had in 2016. The incentive to fix it sits entirely with the person doing the searching.

What actually helps

Search like you mean it. "usb c cable 6ft braided anker" returns a different page from "phone charger". Specific searches have fewer ad slots that fit and fewer junk listings that match.
Use the Brand filter in the left sidebar. Tick the two or three names you recognise and the page shrinks to the products that actually have a company behind them. If no name in the list is one you recognise, that is information too.
Sort by Average Customer Review, then look at the counts. A 4.6 from 38,000 reviews and a 4.6 from 41 reviews are not the same number.
Ignore the percentage next to a "List Price" on a brand you do not know. It is a number the seller typed. We explain the difference between List Price and Typical price in the deal-week guide.
Let your browser do steps 1 to 4 for you. That is what ClearCart is: a free extension that scores every listing on the results page and collapses the junk into a thin bar that says why it was hidden, such as Hidden: made-up brand name or near-identical listing ×6, with one click to bring any of it back. It never deletes anything, runs entirely on your device, and recognises more than 4,000 real brands so it leaves them alone. The Pro controls, including hiding every sponsored placement, are on free for your first 14 days.

Install ClearCart free Chrome, Firefox and Edge. Nothing is collected.

One more thing: this is not only Amazon

Walmart opened its marketplace to the same sellers, and the same four things are happening to walmart.com search a few years behind. The gibberish brands, the clone listings and the keyword titles are already there; the ad density is catching up. Here is what that looks like.