Amazon Competitor Analysis: A Step-by-Step Checklist

A ten-step audit of your Amazon competitors, from listing and offer to reviews, ads, brand and keyword footprint, checked against the rules Amazon documents.

Ongoing tracking tells you when a competitor moves. A competitor analysis tells you why they are where they are: a one-time deep audit before a launch, relaunch or price change, repeated once or twice a year.

This checklist walks through ten steps and notes what Amazon actually documents at each one. Once the audit is done, our guide on how to track your competitors on Amazon covers the daily and weekly routine that keeps it current.

Before you start: set up a clean audit

Do it in one sitting. Prices, deals and badges change daily. Readings taken a week apart aren't comparable.
Use a neutral setup. Amazon says its Featured results consider customer preferences such as items you previously purchased or clicked on. Log out or use a clean browser, and keep one fixed US delivery address, because delivery promises depend on it.
Date everything. Screenshot each search page and detail page so you can compare against them later.

Step 1: Define the competitor set by search overlap

List 10 to 30 money keywords from your ad search term reports and, if you're brand registered, Brand Analytics. Amazon says its Search Query Performance dashboard lists the keywords customers use to find your brand, and its Top Search Terms dashboard lists the top three products, categories and brands associated with each keyword.
Record all organic results on page one for each keyword. Leave out anything labeled "Sponsored."
Count how many of your keywords each product appears on. Pick five to eight products with the widest overlap as your audit set, plus one or two fast climbers.

For a lunch box seller, a product that ranks on "lunch box," "bento box for adults" and "insulated lunch bag" is a core competitor. A product that only appears on one niche term is situational. For more on choosing the keyword set, see how many keywords to track.

Step 2: Audit the title (and Item Highlights)

Amazon lists title, price and description among the item information its Featured results consider. Titles are also where 2026 brought the biggest rule change.

75 characters since July 27, 2026. Amazon announced in the Seller Forums that "titles in all categories except for media will need to be 75 characters or less including spaces." Titles still over the limit after that date "will be updated to the AI recommendation gradually," and brand owners get 14 days to review the AI suggestions before they go live. Older guides still cite the 200-character limit from January 2025. It no longer applies to most categories.
Item Highlights. Amazon added a field with "an additional 125 characters for sharing materials or recommended use cases." Amazon says this text is searchable and appears with titles in search results and on product pages. Amazon hasn't said whether it weighs these words the same as title words.
Formatting rules from 2025. Amazon's January 2025 title rules barred the characters ! $ ? _ { } ^ ¬ ¦ unless they are part of the brand name, and they barred using the same word more than twice (prepositions, articles and conjunctions excepted).

Record per competitor: the exact title, its length, the first three words, which of your keywords it contains, and the Item Highlights. Note whose titles still run long, since Amazon said it would rewrite those. A generic, machine-sounding title on a strong product is an opening for you.

Step 3: Audit the images

The main image wins or loses the click on the results page. Amazon staff have listed the main image requirements in the Seller Forums: a pure white background (RGB 255, 255, 255), a product that fills 85% or more of the frame, and at least 1,000 pixels on the longest side to enable zoom. Amazon's own SEO guide repeats the white background and 85% fill.

Within those rules, record for each competitor:

Main image: angle, how much of the frame the product fills, whether the packaging is shown, how it reads at thumbnail size next to the others
Secondary images: count, lifestyle versus infographic, size or scale references, comparison charts
Video: present or not
Claims made in images: capacity, materials, certifications, warranty

Put all main images from one keyword side by side. If they all show the same angle, a different angle is a cheap test.

Step 4: Audit bullets, A+ content and variations

Bullets. Amazon's SEO guide recommends starting each bullet with a one- or two-word description, then an explanation "in 100 characters or fewer." Third-party guides disagree on character limits; your category template sets them. In an audit, the order of benefits matters more. Sellers usually lead with their strongest argument, so the first bullet is a good read on what each competitor thinks wins the sale.

A+ content. Amazon says A+ Content is free for brands enrolled in Brand Registry. Record whether each competitor has it, whether it includes a comparison chart (and which products it compares against), and which objections it answers. It shows who they see as their alternatives.

Variations. Amazon defines variations as products related by color, size or other attributes, and says functionally different products should be listed separately. Record the variation theme, the number of children, and the price range across children. Since February 12, 2026, Amazon shares reviews only "between variations with minor differences that don't affect functionality." A family that lost review sharing may show a lower count or a different rating on some children. More in Amazon variations and rankings.

Step 5: Audit the offer

Current price and price history. One price point tells you little. Note the current price, then look at the history: is this a base price or a temporary deal? Our competitor price tracking guide covers how to read it.
Reference price. Amazon's help page on strike-through pricing says it only shows a List Price if the product was bought on Amazon or offered by other retailers at or above that price in the past 90 days (180 for seasonal products), except for books. The Typical Price is "the 90-day median price paid by customers for the product on Amazon," excluding limited-time promotions. A competitor that shows no strike-through may be discounting so often that the reference price no longer validates.
Featured Offer. Amazon describes the Featured Offer (formerly the Buy Box) as the prominent offer area on the product page. Its seller guidance says Featured Offer prices are "commonly at or below the lowest priced alternatives," that offers with fast, free shipping are more likely to be featured, and that an out-of-stock offer can't be featured. Note whether the brand owns the Featured Offer or a reseller does.
Fulfillment and delivery promise. The "Ships from" and "Sold by" lines show who fulfills. Amazon lists delivery speed and shipping costs among its Featured results factors. Record the delivery date shown to your fixed address. See delivery speed and Amazon ranking.
Coupons and deals. Note any coupon badge or deal label, and its size.

Step 6: Analyze the reviews

Know how the rating is built. Amazon says it "calculates a product's star rating using machine-learned models instead of a simple average," weighing factors such as how recent a review is and verified purchase status. Amazon also says it doesn't count ratings without Verified Purchase status until the customer adds text, an image or a video. A 4.4 and a 4.5 aren't directly comparable as averages.

Record the counts. Rating, total ratings and, if you can, the count a few months ago. Velocity beats the total.

Mine the negative reviews. Read the one- to three-star reviews in your set and tag each complaint: durability, size, leaks, missing parts, instructions. Two types matter most:

Problems that show up across several competitors. That's a category gap you can design out.
Problems unique to one competitor. That's a weakness you can address in your images and bullets.

Amazon's "Customers say" summary, which it describes as an AI-powered feature that highlights sentiment mentioned frequently across written reviews, is a quick first pass. Read the reviews themselves before you act on it.

Check Vine. Amazon describes Vine Voices as invited reviewers who try products free of charge, and says sellers can't contact them. Vine reviews are labeled. Many Vine reviews on a young listing say something about its launch budget, not its quality.

Step 7: Read sales signals, with caveats

Best Sellers Rank. Amazon says BSR is based on Amazon sales, updated frequently, and reflects recent and historical sales. Its seller guide adds that recent sales count more, that page views and reviews don't influence BSR, that a product can hold different ranks in different categories, and that "a top BSR doesn't always equal a high organic search ranking." So compare BSR only within the same category, and treat it as a relative snapshot, not a unit count. The Best Seller badge guide explains the details.

"Bought in past month." Marketplace Pulse reported in March 2023 that Amazon began showing this label, rounded to hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands and capped at "100K+." It's a rounded estimate and doesn't appear on every listing. Use it to rank competitors by rough demand ("2K+" versus "300+"), not to calculate their revenue.

Step 8: Map advertising presence

Amazon Ads says Sponsored Products can appear at the top of, alongside or within search results and on product pages, and are labeled "Sponsored." Sponsored Brands run in prominent spots such as the top of search results.

For each keyword, note which competitors appear in sponsored placements on page one and whether they also rank organically. Three patterns matter:

Organic and sponsored on the same keyword: the competitor is defending a term that matters to them.
Sponsored but not organic: they're buying their way onto a keyword they haven't earned yet. That's often a target they're working on.
Organic but no ads: a term they may be taking for granted.

Ad placements rotate, so treat this as a rough map, not a budget estimate.

Step 9: Check brand signals

Amazon Brand Registry requires a pending or registered trademark. Amazon lists A+ Content, Brand Stores, Sponsored Brands, Vine and Brand Analytics among its benefits. You can't look up registration status directly, but these are strong indicators:

a "Visit the … Store" link to a Brand Store (Amazon Ads says Stores are available to sellers enrolled in Brand Registry)
A+ content on the detail page
Sponsored Brands ads for the brand
Vine reviews

A competitor showing none of them may not be brand registered, and if so, it can't use those tools against you.

Step 10: Measure keyword footprint

Last, measure how much of your search territory each competitor holds: for every keyword, note whether each competitor ranks organically on page one and where. Then summarize:

Breadth: the number of your keywords each competitor ranks on
Strength: their average position on those keywords
Weighted footprint: the same, weighted by how much each keyword matters to your sales

Broad-but-middling and narrow-but-dominant are different threats. Our guide to visibility as share of page one shows how to turn this into one number.

Turn findings into a positioning matrix and action list

Condense everything into one row per product, with yours at the top.

Product	Price / ref. price	Rating (count)	Delivery	Main angle (title + image)	Top complaint	Ads seen	Brand signals	Keyword footprint
You
Competitor A
Competitor B

Then read it column by column and write one action per gap:

Where everyone is the same, differentiation is cheap. Same main image angle, same first bullet, same price band: change one.
Where a competitor wins on something fixable, fix it. Faster delivery, a comparison chart, a clearer title.
Where the category shares a complaint, take it to product development. That's the hardest gap to copy.
Where you can't win, don't fight there. If a competitor holds the low-price position with a stronger offer, position on quality, bundle or use case instead.

Give each action an owner, a date and a number to watch.

Keeping the audit current

A one-time audit goes stale fast. JustRanks records the whole organic first page of Amazon.com search results for more than 200,000 keywords over time, from a fixed US delivery address, overnight US time. Keywords saved in any user's market are captured every day, all others every 48h. Ads never count. For each product it stores position, price, list price, rating, review count, "bought in past month," badges (Best Seller, Amazon's Choice, deals) and delivery promise, so much of the offer, review and footprint data in this checklist already has a history. Markets hold up to 100 keywords per product, you can mark key competitors, and Head-to-Head compares two products keyword by keyword. No Seller Central access is needed.