[ BDSN ] Amazon's canonical url manipulation

💰 AEO for AMAZON SELLERS: HOW to OPTIMIZE YOUR BRAND

This is part 2. For the foundational first part, please see last Monday’s newsletter.

Your Action Plan: What to Do This Week (part 1 was published Monday)

1. Check Your Bing Indexing (Critical)

• Go to Bing Webmaster Tools

• Submit your site if not already indexed

• ChatGPT won't see you without this

2. Audit Your Reddit Reputation

Search Reddit for:

• Your brand name

• Your product names

• "[Your category] recommendations"

Read every thread. What are people saying? This is your AI training data.

What to look for:

• Recurring complaints

• "Why I switched from X to Y" posts

• Feature comparisons

• Quality issues

3. Test Your AI Visibility

Ask these exact questions in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google:

• "Best [your product category] for [use case]"

• "Is [Your Brand] worth it?"

• "[Your Brand] vs [Competitor]"

Screenshot the results. Do you appear? How are you described? Who wins instead?

4. Fix Your Technical Foundation

Check these now:

• Is your site server-side rendered? (AI crawlers don't execute JavaScript well)

• Page speed under 2 seconds? (AI crawlers are impatient)

• Do you have schema markup on product pages? (Sites with schema are 2-4x more likely to appear in AI Overviews)

• Are AI crawlers blocked in your robots.txt? (Some sites accidentally blocked them during copyright debates)

Within the next Month: Content Updates

1. Freshen Your Best Content

Content updated within 30 days gets 3.2x more AI citations.

Quick wins:

• Add "2026" to titles

• Update product photos and specs

• Add a "What's New" section at the top

• Refresh any statistics or data

• Update pricing information

2. Create Comparison Content

Write articles like:

• "[Your Brand] vs [Competitor]: Which is Better?"

• "Why We Switched from [Competitor] to [Your Brand]"

• "[Your Product] Review: Honest Experience After 6 Months"

AI reads these to understand category relationships. If you explain why you're better for specific use cases, AI will repeat your positioning.

3. Build Integration/How-To Guides

If your products work with other systems or have specific use cases, document them:

• "How to Use [Your Product] for [Specific Job]"

• "Complete Setup Guide: [Your Product] + [Complementary Product]"

• "[Your Product] for [Specific Customer Type]: Complete Guide"

These make you citable when users ask workflow questions.

By end of March: Strategic Moves

1. Cultivate Positive User Content

The strategy: Enable customers to share experiences publicly.

Where to encourage reviews:

• Reddit (r/[yourcategory] subreddits)

• YouTube (unboxing, comparison videos)

• Product Hunt

• Industry forums

• Amazon Q&A and reviews

Critical rule: Be authentic. Reddit hates spam. Follow the 90/10 rule: 90% helpful content, 10% product mentions.

2. Get Into Review Aggregators

AI weights these heavily:

• PCMag

• Wirecutter

• G2

• Capterra

• Category-specific review sites

Reach out. Offer product samples. Get reviewed. If you're not in the comparison tables, you're invisible.

3. Publish Original Data

Even a small customer survey gives you unique stats to cite.

Examples:

• "We surveyed 100 customers about [pain point]"

• "Our data shows [category insight]"

• "Customer success metrics: [specific results]"

When bloggers reference your data, AI picks up those citations and attributes authority to your brand.

4. Implement Schema Markup

Add structured data to your product pages:

• Product schema (name, price, availability, reviews)

• FAQ schema (Q&A performs exceptionally well)

• Organization schema (establishes you as an entity)

• Review/Rating schema

This helps AI "understand" your content.

5. Create an llms.txt File

New proposed standard: yourdomain.com/llms.txt

Structure your content this way:

Bad opening: "Choosing the right [product] is an important decision that depends on many factors including your budget, needs, and preferences..."

Good opening: "The [Your Product] is the best option for [specific use case] because [clear reason]. For [different use case], the [Alternative] offers better [specific feature] at [price point]."

AI systems retrieve by looking for direct answers first, then context.

Use this structure:

1. Direct, concise answer (2-3 sentences)

2. Detailed explanation

3. Supporting data and examples

4. FAQ section

🔭 YOU GOTTA SEE THIS

What happens when you lose your money, your health, and almost your life, all at once?

In this episode of Marketing Misfits, Norm Farrar and Kevin King talk with Ingrid Macher, a fitness entrepreneur and global influencer who went from being broke, overweight, and facing a near-death asthma attack … to losing 50 pounds in 90 days and building a multi-million-dollar wellness business serving millions worldwide.

This is not a surface-level influencer story. Ingrid breaks down the exact mindset shift, health reset, and marketing strategy that changed everything, and why most people fail to grow an audience or business even when they have “followers.”

If you care about organic growth, paid ads that actually work, audience building, fitness transformation, or monetizing influence, this episode delivers real lessons.

📺 THE DAY SARAH FINALLY TURNED ON HER TV

Sarah stared at her Q4 dashboard. Her DTC furniture brand had scaled to $8M annually through the usual channels: Facebook, Google, TikTok. But CPAs were climbing, and she was hitting ceiling after ceiling.

"We should try TV," her CMO suggested during their weekly meeting.

Sarah laughed. "TV? That's for Nike and Coca-Cola. We'd need millions just to get started."

But the numbers weren't lying. Her Facebook CPAs had doubled in six months. Customer acquisition was becoming unsustainable.

Against her better judgment, she agreed to explore it.

The Pilot

They started small with $15K monthly, testing both streaming and linear placements. Sarah insisted on the same performance tracking they used for every other channel. If they couldn't measure it, they weren't doing it.

Week one: crickets. Week two: a slight uptick in direct traffic. Week three: something interesting happened.

Their Google Shopping campaigns suddenly became more efficient. Organic search volume spiked. People were finding them without paid ads.

"It's the halo effect," her CMO explained. "People see you on TV, then they search for you. TV makes everything else work better."

The Pause

Two months in, Sarah's finance team questioned the spend. "Prove it's working," they demanded.

So they paused TV completely.

Within ten days, website visits dropped 22%. Direct traffic fell off a cliff. Even their Google campaigns struggled.

They turned TV back on. Traffic bounced back immediately.

The Scale

Six months later, TV had become their second-largest acquisition channel. Not because it replaced digital—because it amplified everything else.

Her takeaway? "I thought TV was a brand play. Turns out it's just another performance channel, only bigger."

The myths had kept her on the sidelines for years. Starting small and measuring ruthlessly had proven them wrong.

The lesson: The brands still treating TV like a 1990s branding exercise are leaving money on the table. The ones treating it like Facebook—with attribution, testing, and scaling—are building moats their competitors can't cross.

🔗  AMAZON’S CANONICAL URL MANIPULATION

Amazon sellers should check their canonical URLs immediately, as some are discovering a troubling issue that's turning their hard-earned organic traffic into paid advertising opportunities.

The Problem:

A seller conducting a routine canonical URL audit discovered that roughly 30% of their product listings had corrupted canonical tags. Instead of the standard format (/dp/keywords/ASIN), these URLs were redirecting to Amazon search results pages filled with sponsored listings.

Here's how it works: When shoppers find your product through Google and click through, they land on a search results page, not your product detail page. To actually get the sale, you now have to outbid competitors in sponsored placements.

What You Should Do:

1. Check your canonical URLs now - View your product page source code and search for "canonical"

2. Verify the format - Proper canonicals should include /dp/ followed by your ASIN

3. Fix immediately - If your canonical points to a search results page, correct it through Amazon's backend or open a case with Seller Central support:

   • Provide the ASIN, the current canonical (the problematic URL), and the desired corrected format (a clean /dp/ASIN product URL).

   • Explain that the canonical currently points to a search results page and is harming external SEO and customer experience.

4. Make it routine - Check monthly to catch these issues early

This appears to be affecting quite a few listings, turning what should be traffic from Google into yet another advertising expense. The root cause is unclear, whether it's Amazon's doing or a technical glitch, but the impact is real money leaving sellers' pockets.

✌🏼 Have a great weekend.

See you again on Monday.

The answer to today’s STUMP BEZOS is
Tuesday after Cyber Monday is a bigger discount day