Amazon Drafts Plan to Index Every Product Online by October 2027

Amazon has drafted an internal plan to build a universal product catalog covering virtually every item for sale on the internet, whether or not Amazon sells it. Reuters reported the plan on Friday. The initiative, named the World Product Graph, is laid out in a six-page PR/FAQ document with an aspirational launch date of October 1, 2027. Amazon told Reuters the document is a "draft, outdated" brainstorming memo that "doesn't necessarily reflect our current plans."

The stakes are straightforward. Amazon wants to keep shoppers inside its walls before AI shopping agents pull them out.

What does the document actually propose?

The PR/FAQ uses Amazon's standard format for pitching new products. It argues that Amazon "cannot be the go-destination for every shopping mission if customers must leave to research product relationships on Google, brand websites, and review sites." The proposed fix has two parts: ingest product data directly from brands and retailers, and crawl other retailers' websites to fill the gaps.

Some groundwork exists. Coca-Cola and Bayer have already agreed to contribute data, according to the document, and a "CEO-level P&G/Amazon summit" was held to discuss a trial with Procter & Gamble. The project sits inside Amazon's Selection & Catalog Systems unit, run by vice president Robert Tekiela. Reuters could not determine whether the October 2027 date is realistic, or whether Amazon would need permission to crawl competitor sites.

How does this connect to Shop Direct?

Amazon is already building toward this model. In February 2025 it launched Shop Direct, which shows products from other merchants inside Amazon search results and in its AI assistant, Alexa for Shopping — renamed from Rufus in May 2026. Customers can click through to the merchant's site or, for eligible items, use "Buy for Me" to have Amazon complete the purchase on the merchant's site using the customer's Amazon payment and shipping details.

On November 4, Amazon opened the Shop Direct Merchant Workspace, a self-service portal that lets merchants connect existing product feeds through providers such as Feedonomics, Salsify, CEDCommerce and VersaFeed. Amazon says tens of millions of customers have discovered hundreds of millions of products through Shop Direct, which appears in hundreds of millions of searches monthly.

Why now? The AI agent threat

The document frames the World Product Graph as a defensive moat against AI shopping agents that could redirect traffic away from Amazon. The pressure is real. Meta's Muse agent attracted more than 10 million users in the U.S. and Canada after its September launch, and JPMorgan called it a potential "most widely used consumer AI application since ChatGPT." Amazon blocked Muse from its retail site in September and sued Perplexity in 2025 to stop its Comet browser agent from accessing Amazon. That case is ongoing.

CEO Andy Jassy said on the Q3 earnings call that "few customers are doing much shopping this way yet" and that advertising impact has been minimal. But the document suggests executives are preparing for a shift.

Whose numbers are right on accuracy?

The PR/FAQ is blunt about the weaknesses of Alexa for Shopping: "Many Rufus answers are factually wrong or incomplete, but customers lack expertise to detect these errors." It says the assistant handles about 83 million searches weekly and that running those searches is "expensive," arguing that richer product data would let Amazon use cheaper models.

Amazon disputes both points. In its statement to Reuters, the company said its data shows Alexa for Shopping is "roughly 97% accurate globally" and that the usage figures in the document are "significantly outdated." Neither set of numbers can be independently verified.

What remains open?

Several questions have no answers yet:

• Whether the World Product Graph will move beyond the PR/FAQ stage; Amazon's own statement stresses that not all such documents become products.
• How Amazon would legally and technically crawl competitor sites at scale, and whether brands would voluntarily feed data to a competitor's index.
• Whether October 1, 2027 is a genuine milestone or a placeholder.
• The current accuracy and query volume of Alexa for Shopping.

For now, the World Product Graph is a proposal, not a product. Shop Direct and Buy for Me show the direction of travel, but the leap to a comprehensive, self-updating graph of the world's products — maintained partly by crawling rivals — remains aspirational.