Amazon is packing its search results with sponsored ads

If you do a search for almost anything on Amazon, the first few results you are likely to see now are sponsored ads, which are paid for by companies to show when Amazon’s customers search for certain terms, reports Recode. It’s only when customers scroll down the search results page that they see the organic search results. And the spending on these sponsored ads increased by 165% in the second quarter of 2018 compared to a year earlier.

So why are companies spending more and more on Amazon sponsored ads? Because, as with Google searches, most users won’t go beyond the first page of product search results on Amazon. In order to guarantee your products show up on that page (and at the top, no less), brands will shell out the big bucks. And that works great for Amazon, which makes money not just selling the ads, but from selling the products as well. The increased presence of ads on search results pages could also help smaller brands–if they’ve got the cash, they can buy ads to get their products seen instead of having them show organically on that ninth page of the search results that no one navigates to.