Amazon reportedly plans 'World Product Graph' to index every product sold online

Amazon is exploring a plan to catalogue products sold across the entire internet — including items it does not stock itself — and to make that information available on its own site. According to The Verge, which cites reporting from Reuters, the internal effort is known as the "World Product Graph," and its goal is to make Amazon the default place where people research what to buy.

Keeping shoppers and their AI agents on Amazon

The motivation, as The Verge explains, is to reduce the number of shoppers who leave Amazon to research purchases on Reddit or Google. If Amazon can answer product questions about goods it does not even sell, customers would have less reason to browse elsewhere, and searches for products sold by other retailers could still land on Amazon's pages.

The same logic applies to AI assistants. The Verge notes that if Amazon amasses the largest collection of shopping data, AI agents may come to rely on Amazon's index over alternatives, meaning even people shopping through bots would be routed to Amazon's pages.

Pieces of this strategy are already visible. Amazon's "shop direct" feature, launched last year, has begun showing links to other retailers' products on Amazon's site.

A fix for a costly, error-prone assistant

The project is also tied to Amazon's AI shopping assistant, Alexa for Shopping, formerly known as Rufus. According to Reuters, an internal Amazon document states that "Many Rufus answers are factually wrong or incomplete," and that running users' searches through the AI is expensive. The reported hope is that more data would make the assistant more accurate and allow it to run on cheaper models.

Far from a done deal

It is unclear whether the plan will ship at all. The internal document reportedly says the project "depends on discovering how brands organize their products on their own websites," which, as The Verge notes, could involve Amazon crawling other retailers' sites — a far larger undertaking than indexing its own catalogue. Reuters says it is unclear if or when the plan may be implemented, although the document included a release date of October 1st, 2027.

Amazon downplayed the report. In a statement to Reuters, the company said draft and outdated documents often give an incomplete picture, and that the existence of a brainstorming document does not necessarily reflect its current plans.

Why it matters

The World Product Graph, if it materializes, would shift Amazon's role from retailer toward something closer to the index of online commerce — a product database so comprehensive that other services, including AI agents, would struggle to bypass it. As more shopping gets mediated by AI assistants, owning the richest product data could matter as much as owning the checkout. The plan also illustrates how the pressure to make AI assistants both accurate and cheap is driving large-scale data consolidation. Finally, it foreshadows friction with the brands and retailers whose websites Amazon would need to crawl to build the index, since the project's stated goal is to intercept customers before they ever reach those sites.