Amazon wants to be the place where product research starts, even for things it does not sell. That is the thrust of an internal document reported by Reuters and covered by The Verge, which describes a database called the World Product Graph. For anyone shopping through an AI agent, the question of who holds the product data decides whose shelf the agent looks at first.
According to Reuters, the graph would hold details on virtually every item sold online and how items relate to each other, such as the differences between an older and a newer model. Data would come from two routes: brands and retailers sending product feeds, and Amazon crawling other retailers' websites. The document names Coca-Cola and Bayer among contributing brands and mentions a trial with Procter and Gamble. It sits in Amazon's Selection and Catalog Systems division and carries a target date of 1 October 2027.
The memo is blunt about Amazon's own assistant. It says many answers from Rufus, now called Alexa for Shopping, are factually wrong or incomplete, and that running searches through the model is expensive. Richer data is meant to make answers more accurate and let Amazon use cheaper models. Amazon told Reuters those figures are significantly outdated and that the assistant is about 97% accurate worldwide.
The competitive logic is clear. OpenAI's Dots agents, Perplexity and Google's Gemini all want to do shopping research on the user's behalf, and every one of them needs product data. If Amazon owns the most complete index, agents have to come to it, which also protects its advertising business. Amazon has already blocked Meta's Muse agent from its own pages, so it is not shy about controlling access.
The limits are large. Amazon calls this a brainstorming document that may not reflect current plans, and Reuters could not confirm whether or when it will happen. Nobody has said whether crawling rival retailers would need their permission, and retailers that block agents today may block Amazon's crawler too. Until Amazon ships something, this is an intention, not a product.