Amazon reportedly plans a World Product Graph indexing all online shopping

A catalogue of everything for sale

Amazon is working on a project to gather information about every product sold anywhere on the internet, including items the company does not stock itself, according to Reuters. The effort is known internally as the World Product Graph.

The idea is to store this vast collection of product data and surface it on Amazon's own site. A shopper looking for an item sold by another retailer could still find the relevant details on Amazon, which would keep the research and, ideally, the purchase inside the company's ecosystem.

Why Amazon wants the data

The reported goal is to stop shoppers from leaving Amazon to compare products on Reddit or Google. If Amazon holds the largest pool of shopping information, people researching a purchase would have less reason to go elsewhere, even when the product itself is sold by a competitor.

The same logic applies to AI shopping agents, the software assistants that browse and buy on a user's behalf. Reuters reports that Amazon hopes such agents would draw on its index rather than a rival source, steering bot-assisted shoppers towards Amazon pages as well.

Some building blocks already exist. A shop direct feature launched last year places links to outside retailers' products on Amazon, and the company runs an AI shopping assistant called Alexa for Shopping, previously known as Rufus.

Fixing the AI assistant

The World Product Graph is also meant to improve Amazon's own assistant. An internal document seen by Reuters states that many Rufus answers are factually wrong or incomplete, and that running user searches through the AI is costly.

Feeding the system more product data is expected to make its answers more accurate. It could also allow Amazon to rely on smaller, cheaper AI models, which would reduce the expense of handling each query.

Uncertain future for the project

It is not clear whether the plan will ever become reality. Reuters reports that the internal document says the project depends on discovering how brands organise their product information on their own websites, which could require Amazon to crawl other retailers' pages.

The document reportedly includes a release date of 1 October 2027, but Reuters notes it is unclear if or when the plan might be put into practice.

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 In a statement to Reuters, the company said draft, outdated documents often paint an incomplete picture and that the existence of a brainstorming document does not necessarily reflect its current plans.

What it means for shoppers and retailers

If the project goes ahead, it would mark a significant shift in how Amazon presents products. The site would no longer be limited to its own catalogue but could act as a gateway to goods sold across the wider web, with Amazon capturing the traffic and the data along the way.

For other retailers, the prospect of Amazon indexing their listings raises questions about competition and control over their own product information. For shoppers and AI agents, the practical effect would depend on how complete and accurate the index turns out to be, something that remains unconfirmed while the project exists only as an internal planning document.