Amazon Rufus
Amazon's AI shopping assistant that answered product questions and gave recommendations in the Amazon app.
What is Amazon Rufus?
Amazon Rufus was Amazon's built-in AI shopping chatbot, which answered product questions and gave recommendations inside the Amazon app (for example, asking "is this backpack good for a 15-inch laptop" and getting a direct answer synthesized from the listing and reviews rather than having to read through them yourself. IMPORTANT STATUS UPDATE: Rufus as a standalone product no longer exists as of May 2026) it was folded into a broader assistant called Alexa for Shopping.
Why it matters
Amazon introduced Rufus in beta on February 1, 2024, and expanded it to all U.S. customers by July 2024; by 2025 the company reported more than 300 million customers had used it, with over 50 feature upgrades shipped in November 2025 alone (account memory, automatic cart adds, price alerts, auto-buy at a target price). On May 13, 2026, Amazon retired the Rufus brand and merged its product-knowledge capabilities with Alexa+'s personalization layer into a single assistant called Alexa for Shopping, available for free to any signed-in U.S. customer across the Amazon app, website, and Echo Show. With no Prime membership or Echo device required. Amazon has said the underlying data sources and recommendation logic carried over from Rufus largely unchanged; what changed was the branding and its unification with Alexa's voice and personalization capabilities into one assistant.