Your Sponsored Products Ads Are Running Off Amazon
On 10 August Amazon put Sponsored Products inside creator content off its own site, and enrolled your campaigns for you. Here is where that spend hides.
On 10 August 2026, Amazon began serving Sponsored Products ads inside content published by creators in its Influencer Program: reviews, buying guides and roundups that sit on other people's websites, not on Amazon.
Campaigns were enrolled automatically. There was no opt-in screen, no email asking permission, and no change to your bids or budgets to mark the moment. If a campaign was set to "Increase reach" for off-Amazon serving, which is Amazon's default, it started competing for this inventory on the day.
Most of the coverage treated this as the day Amazon's ads left Amazon. That part is wrong, and the mistake matters, because it sends people looking for the wrong thing in their reports.
What actually changed, and what didn't
Sponsored Products has been able to serve off Amazon since 2025, on partner sites and apps. If you have ever exported a placement report and seen a small line of spend you couldn't account for, you were probably already looking at it.
What changed in August is the inventory, not the mechanism. Creator content was added to the pool your existing campaigns bid into. The setting that governs it is the same one that has been sitting in your campaign settings, defaulted on, for over a year.
So the honest framing is not "Amazon switched something on without telling you." It is that a switch most sellers never knew existed just got connected to a much larger room.
The four buckets, and the one people misread
Amazon reports Sponsored Products placement in exactly four buckets. Off-Amazon is one of them. There is no fifth bucket, and no separate creator line: creator placements land inside the off-Amazon total alongside partner sites and apps. If you are looking for a row labelled "creators", you will not find one.
There is a trap here that has cost people real money this year, and it has nothing to do with August.
Amazon renamed the placement labels on 28 May 2026. The old names stopped that day and new ones took over:
- "Top of search (first page)" became "Top of Search on-Amazon"
- "Product pages" became "Detail Page on-Amazon"
- "Rest of search" became "Other on-Amazon"
- "Off Amazon" stayed as it was
We verified this by lining up the ten days either side of the switchover in a live account. The volumes run continuously straight through the rename: same traffic, different words. Nothing broke on Amazon's side.
Plenty broke on everyone else's. Any saved filter, pivot table, rules engine or third-party tool that matched on the old wording quietly stopped recognising those placements. The failure is silent, because a report that returns no matching rows looks identical to a placement with no activity. We found this in our own code, where a rule that had been steering bids on product pages had been sitting inert for roughly seven weeks without raising a single error.
If you keep any spreadsheet or automation that keys off placement names, that is worth ten minutes today. "Other on-Amazon" is rest of search. It is not a junk bucket, and it is not off-Amazon traffic.
Your placement levers do not reach it
This is the part almost every article on the August change gets wrong, and it is the reason people think they have this under control when they don't.
Placement bid adjustments only exist for three of the four buckets: top of search, product pages and rest of search. You can push each of those up to 900%. Off-Amazon carries full metrics, but it has no bid modifier at all. There is nothing to set.
That means the standard move, dialling placements up and down to steer where budget concentrates, does nothing to off-Amazon spend. You can take top of search to +900% and product pages to zero, and off-Amazon keeps bidding at your base bid regardless. Dynamic bidding rules still apply, so your bids can still flex there, but the deliberate placement-level control you thought you had over budget distribution simply isn't connected to this inventory.
The only real control is the campaign setting itself: "Increase reach" off Amazon, or limit it. It is binary, and it is per campaign.
Why you probably can't audit it
Here is the operational detail that surprised us most, and the reason a spreadsheet audit is likely to mislead you.
The Sponsored Products v3 API, which is what most tools and most agencies read, does not report this setting. Not "reports it as default" — does not report it. We swept an entire advertising account with several hundred Sponsored Products campaigns and not one of them returned the field. Through that API, a campaign left on Amazon's default and a campaign you deliberately limited last month are indistinguishable.
The value is only stated through Amazon's newer unified Ads API, where it sits under the campaign's budget settings. Until a tool reads that, any claim about which of your campaigns are enrolled is a guess dressed as a fact.
For most sellers the practical route is the console or bulksheets. Amazon added an off-Amazon ad serving column to Sponsored Products bulksheets in June 2026 for US advertisers, which is the only sane way to see and change this across more than a handful of campaigns. In the console it lives in campaign settings, in the section covering ads served off Amazon.
Off-Amazon placement is live in the US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, India, Turkey, the Middle East, North Africa and parts of the EU. The UK was not on Amazon's list.
What to do, in order
Pull a placement report before you change anything. Thirty days, split by placement. You need to know what off-Amazon is actually costing you and what it returns, not what you assume. In plenty of accounts it is a rounding error. In some it is not, and the only way to tell them apart is to look.
Judge it on its own numbers. This is ordinary ad inventory, and it should clear the same bar as anything else. If off-Amazon converts at an acceptable cost, leaving it on is a reasonable decision. If it spends meaningfully and returns nothing, limit it.
Change it per campaign, not everywhere. The setting is campaign-level for a reason. Your defensive and brand campaigns have a different tolerance for loosely-targeted reach than a tightly-managed exact-match campaign does.
Do it before budgets rise. This is the Q4 argument. Off-Amazon spend scales with the budget you give a campaign, and Q4 is when everyone raises budgets. A line that was tolerable in September gets multiplied in November, on inventory where your placement controls don't apply. Decide now, while the numbers are small enough to read calmly.
Frequently asked questions
Were my campaigns really enrolled without asking? Yes, if they were set to "Increase reach" for off-Amazon serving, which is Amazon's default. Existing bids and budgets carried over unchanged.
How do I see creator placements specifically? You can't. They are reported inside the off-Amazon total, together with partner sites and apps. There is no separate creator line in the placement report.
Can I set a lower bid for off-Amazon? No. Off-Amazon has no placement bid adjustment. Your only lever is whether the campaign serves off Amazon at all.
Can I block individual creators? Amazon does allow creator-level exclusions without switching off the whole campaign, which is worth knowing if one specific placement is the problem rather than the inventory as a whole.
Does this affect Sponsored Brands or Sponsored Display? No. The off-Amazon serving control is Sponsored Products only.
Is off-Amazon traffic bad? Not inherently. It is cheaper, less intent-driven traffic than a search result on Amazon. That suits some products and wastes money on others. Treat it as a placement to be measured, not a setting to panic about.
The theme running through all of this is that the change itself was small and the visibility around it was poor. The spend was always in your reports. It just sat under a label nobody reads, with no lever attached, in a bucket that quietly got renamed four months ago.
Seller Sphere keeps this in view: your placement split with the current labels, what off-Amazon is genuinely costing per campaign, and which campaigns are still on Amazon's default rather than a decision you made. If you are heading into Q4 raising budgets, that is a number worth seeing before you raise them.