Amazon’s reported plan to build a broad product database comes as retailers debate whether outside AI shopping tools should be allowed to browse their sites. Reuters, citing an internal company document and people familiar with the matter, reported that Amazon is developing World Product Graph, a project intended to help shoppers research what to buy, including products Amazon does not sell.
According to the document, cited by investing.com (Reuters), the initiative seeks to “hoover up data on virtually every item for sale on Earth, whether Amazon stocks it or not.” The document lists October 1, 2027, as an aspirational future release date, though Amazon told Reuters that a brainstorming document like this one does not necessarily reflect the company's current plans. Amazon also said it works on ideas and technologies meant to make its product catalog more comprehensive, accurate and helpful, and cautioned that draft or outdated documents may paint an incomplete picture.
The document, according to Reuters, describes two possible sources for product information: brands and retailers that continuously contribute data to Amazon, and Amazon’s own crawling of other retailers’ websites. Reuters said it could not determine how Amazon planned to crawl those sites or whether permission would be required in every case.
Coca-Cola, Bayer and a P&G Summit
The internal document, as reported by Economic Times, says Amazon has signed Coca-Cola and Bayer up to contribute product data on an ongoing basis and held a CEO-level summit with Procter & Gamble about a possible trial. The project sits within Amazon’s Selection & Catalog Systems unit and is being organized by division vice president Robert Tekiela. The document quotes Tekiela saying customers need help understanding how products relate and deciding what to consider.
The reported project would address a gap in where shoppers begin researching products. A 2025 Morgan Stanley report cited by Reuters found that 16% of online shoppers start product research on Amazon, compared with 57% on Google. Among shoppers who already know what they want, 41% start on Amazon, versus 23% on Google and 18% on Walmart. Reuters reported that the database could help shoppers identify newer product versions and options suited to their shopping history, while strengthening Amazon’s competition with Google and Walmart.
Rufus Struggles While Amazon Locks Out Rivals
The internal document described Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, Rufus, as often giving factually wrong or incomplete answers and said it was used for about 83 million searches a week. Amazon told Reuters those figures were significantly outdated; after rebranding Rufus as Alexa for Shopping in May, the company said the assistant was roughly 97% accurate globally. CEO Andy Jassy said on Amazon’s third-quarter earnings call that more than 400 million people had used Alexa for Shopping in the past year. He also said few customers were doing much shopping through AI agents and that the company’s advertising business had so far been minimally affected by them.
Amazon has also restricted access by outside shopping agents. In September 2026, it blocked Meta’s Muse AI shopping agent from its retail site after Meta declined a request to remove the bot, according to Bloomberg. Amazon told CNBC it had asked Meta to remove Amazon from the Muse experience entirely. Muse had gained more than 10 million users across the U.S. and Canada since its September launch. JPMorgan has said the agent could become the most widely used consumer AI application since ChatGPT.
People familiar with the matter told Reuters that Amazon executives are wary of agents directing shoppers to other sites with more complete product data. Amazon sued AI firm Perplexity in 2025 over similar access to its site; the lawsuit remains ongoing.
Retailers are still working out how to manage access by AI shopping tools.
Amazon is among the retailers taking a particularly restrictive approach. An audit by Billions Network and AmanTrue of access rules at 51 large U.S. retailers found that five—including Amazon, Kohl’s and Neiman Marcus—explicitly restrict shopping agents, while 37 others block them largely through older bot rules, CNBC reported. The audit also found that none of the 51 retailers had built a way for a verified agent to complete a purchase.
What crawler rules and survey findings show
The IETF’s RFC 9309 describes robots.txt rules as requests for crawlers to honor and says they are not a form of access authorization. The protocol therefore does not, by itself, establish permission to access or reuse a site’s data, according to the IETF. A separate survey offers a measure of consumer expectations, rather than a count of completed AI-assisted purchases: a Useberry survey commissioned by adMarketplace reported that 60% of consumers said AI would become standard for online shopping. It sampled 1,018 U.S. consumers on July 17, 2025; adMarketplace described the sample as representative by age and gender.
Other retailers have set different conditions. Shopify’s Robot & agent policy requires so-called buy-for-me agents to include a human review step and directs developers to use the company’s checkout technology, according to Modern Retail. The publication’s review of robots.txt files found that Walmart and eBay had not made similar changes to block AI bots.
Amazon is developing shopping tools of its own. The company recently introduced a text-based Alexa feature for select invited U.S. customers, allowing them to search for items, add them to a cart and complete purchases through natural-language text queries, according to TechCrunch. Amazon said it planned to expand access in the coming weeks.
Amazon is also moving staff internally to support World Product Graph, according to a person familiar with the matter. The company has cautioned that the project could still be changed or abandoned for financial or other reasons, and Reuters said it could not determine whether or when it would be implemented. The reported plans also include Buy for Me and Shop Direct, tools that would list products sold elsewhere and let customers purchase them through Amazon as an intermediary.
