Breaking: Amazon folds the Rufus AI assistant into a new "Alexa for Shopping" feature

Good morning.

I’ll be short up top today because of the breaking news below, but a couple of quickies first.

Amazon and Perplexity are scheduled to be back in court on Friday in a potentially big case that could help decide who controls website access for AI agents, in this case Perplexity’s. Is it the owner of the website (Amazon) or the human behind an AI agent (in this case, an Amazon customer)? The ramifications could extend well beyond e-commerce to media websites and other sectors too, which is why industry trade groups are already picking sides.

Friday’s hearing addresses whether to pause the Amazon v. Perplexity case in the lower court while an appellate court handles Perplexity’s appeal. If the judge lets the lower-court case keep moving, Perplexity will have to fight on two legal fronts ahead of June 11 oral arguments in the higher court.

Also, Shopify said its early data on AI shopping suggests regular search is still far bigger than AI search as a traffic source for online merchants: in fact, organic search still sends more sessions than all tracked AI platforms combined. But the AI-referred shoppers who do arrive appear to be more valuable, with Shopify saying they convert at nearly 50 percent higher rates than organic-search visitors and carry 14 percent higher average order values. That makes sense considering many product queries in AI search are related to higher-consideration purchases.

One big caveat is attribution. Some AI-assisted shopping journeys, including traffic referred from Google’s AI Overview search results, can still show up as organic search in standard analytics tools, so the industry may not be measuring all of this cleanly yet.

A final note: I’m once again serving as a co-host of Fortune’s annual Brainstorm Tech summit in Aspen from June 8 to 10, where I’m conducting onstage interviews with the CEOs of Whatnot, Twitch, Wonder, C.H. Robinson, and Agility Robotics. Hit me with your questions for them.

And if you’re interested in attending, let me know. I may be able to help with access or discounted passes for a limited number of The Aisle readers.

Now on to the good stuff…

This was not going to be another Amazon-centric newsletter this week until the company notified me yesterday that it planned to announce Alexa for Shopping, a new AI shopping experience that folds Rufus into Amazon’s better-known Alexa brand and formalizes the expansion of the AI assistant across more of the Amazon app, website, and Echo Show devices.

Amazon’s press release announcing the news stops short of declaring a funeral for Rufus. But between the wording of the announcement and a confirmation from Amazon PR, it’s clear: the Rufus brand name is going away.

Maybe the move was the result of some internal power struggle. Maybe it was simply about Alexa being a household name and Rufus being, well, Rufus. Maybe Rufus also failed miserably in customer-awareness testing. Or maybe it was some combination of all of those things.

Whatever the reason, my first reaction when I learned about the change was to assume Alexa for Shopping was mainly about voice AI, or voice search, or bringing more shopping to Echo devices. I have to imagine plenty of regular Amazon customers will make the same leap. But that leap is mostly wrong.