Amazon retires Rufus, launches Alexa for Shopping powered by Alexa+ to revamp product search
Amazon $AMZN swapped its 2024 AI shopping chatbot Rufus for Alexa for Shopping, powered by Alexa+. It turns the search bar into a Q&A engine, lets shoppers compare items side by side and schedule purchases when a product hits a target price. Sources: CNBC, TechCrunch
Amazon $AMZN has retired Rufus, its 2024 generative AI shopping chatbot, replacing it with a new assistant called Alexa for Shopping, powered by Alexa+. The new feature turns Amazon's search bar into a Q&A engine. Shoppers can ask natural-language questions about products, compare items side by side, and schedule a purchase to trigger automatically when a chosen product hits a target price. It is squarely a shopping play. Amazon has not launched a general-purpose AI search engine to challenge Google $GOOGL on the open web; the focus is on tightening discovery and conversion inside its own e-commerce platform. Reporting on the broader AI search landscape notes that Google's search market share fell to about 90% in 2026 from 93% in 2023, with rising AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity taking ground. Sources: CNBC, TechCrunch, Search Engine Journal