Amazon Ads has made Review Requests, the ad format that asks recent buyers to rate a product, available through the Amazon Ads API in the United States as a beta, according to a release note dated November 16, 2026. The short entry answers the commercial question Amazon left open when it first described the product on September 29: the advertiser "pays only when a shopper leaves a rating or review." Through the API, advertisers can create and manage campaigns, choose which products the ads run for, and set a bid and a daily budget. One piece is missing. Review-specific metrics will not reach the reporting API until "a later beta update," so the results have to be read in the Amazon Ads console.

In Short

Amazon now lets advertisers set up its review-request ads through software rather than only by hand, and it says brands pay only when a shopper actually leaves a rating or a review. That matters to US sellers and vendors with newer products, since the ads run only for items with fewer than 1,000 reviews, and to the agencies and tools that manage Amazon campaigns in bulk. What changes is that review invitations can be budgeted and bid on inside automated systems like other Amazon ads, although the review counts themselves stay in Amazon's console instead of the API reports.

Four paragraphs, one new answer

The release note runs to four short paragraphs. Its heading, "Review Requests API (beta)," and its first sentence, "Review Requests (beta) is now available through the Amazon Ads API in the United States," frame it as a developer update. The entry carries the date November 16, 2026, although it was already listed in the Amazon Ads API release notes on November 12.

The second paragraph describes the product itself, and it gives more detail about the format than Amazon had published before. According to Amazon Ads, "A native 'How was your item?' card on Amazon's highest-traffic pages invites a verified purchaser to write a review, and the advertiser pays only when a shopper leaves a rating or review." The company says the product "helps brands gain authentic reviews from verified purchasers" and "gives new products a faster path to authentic reviews."

Two details there are new. The card now has a name and a prompt, "How was your item?", where the September announcement showed only a three-step illustration. And the audience is defined as a verified purchaser, a reviewer whom Amazon has matched to an actual purchase of the item on its own store, where the launch page spoke more loosely of customers who had recently bought the product.

The third paragraph lists the API functions. "With the API, advertisers can create and manage Review Requests campaigns, choose the products that ads run for, and set a bid and daily budget," according to Amazon Ads. The fourth sets the limit: "Available for products with fewer than 1,000 total reviews." It then points developers to a guide titled Get started with Review Requests. The release note itself names no endpoints, request fields or rate limits.

Billing tied to a result

When Amazon Ads first detailed Review Requests on September 29, the announcement said only that campaigns would use the same bidding and budget controls as other Amazon Ads campaigns. PPC Land's coverage on October 12 put the pricing model first on the list of open questions, since the page did not say whether advertisers would pay per impression, per click or per submitted rating.

The release note settles it. Advertisers pay for the outcome, a rating or a review, and not for the card being shown or clicked. That separates Review Requests from Sponsored Products, Amazon's main search format, which is bought through an auction and charged per click. On the release note's wording, a campaign whose card is shown thousands of times and collects no ratings would cost the advertiser nothing.

Much remains unstated. The note says advertisers set "a bid," but not what the bid is for: a maximum price per rating, a price per review, or a value Amazon uses to rank the card against other advertisers' cards. The September announcement described a one-click star rating followed by an optional written review with video or images, so a single shopper can do both. Does that produce one charge or two? The note does not say. Nor does it say whether a one-star rating costs the same as a five-star one. Read literally, the charge depends only on the shopper responding, not on what the shopper writes.

That reading matters in the United States, where the Federal Trade Commission finalised a rule on August 14, 2024 banning the purchase of positive or negative reviews. Under Review Requests, money moves from the advertiser to Amazon, not to the shopper, and nothing in the release note links the charge to the sentiment of a review. The note does not say whether reviews collected through the card will carry any marking on the product detail page.

No price appears anywhere in the entry. There is no minimum bid, no indicative cost per review and no minimum daily budget.

What the API adds

At launch, Amazon listed two places to run the product, Amazon Ads Agent and the Amazon Ads Unified API, and described Review Requests campaigns as an extension of the existing Unified Campaign Management API endpoints. The release note spells out what that extension covers in practice: creating and managing campaigns, picking products, and setting bids and daily budgets. For agencies and software vendors that run Amazon campaigns for many brands at once, that is the difference between a format handled one account at a time in a browser and one that sits inside the campaign tools they already operate.

The pace stands out against Amazon's other September 29 launch. For the DVA+ campaign builder announced the same day, API access is targeted for general availability in the first quarter of 2027. Review Requests reached the API, in beta, within seven weeks of its announcement.

The note does not mention Amazon's MCP server, which Amazon launched in closed beta in November 2025 with tool groups for account management, billing, campaign management and reporting, and which moved to open beta in February 2026 so that AI assistants could call Amazon Ads API functions. Whether those tools can create Review Requests campaigns is not addressed.

Reporting stays behind

For anyone automating campaigns, the most consequential sentence in the note is the one about measurement. "Review performance is available in the Amazon Ads console; review-specific metrics in the reporting API will follow in a later beta update," according to Amazon Ads. No date is attached to that update.

The gap means an API integration can set a bid and a budget but cannot, through the reporting API, read back the result the advertiser is paying for. Automated bidding works by feeding the outcome metric back into the next bid decision. Until review-specific metrics arrive in the reporting API, the cost per rating or review sits in the console, outside that loop.

Amazon's reporting stack is itself mid-transition. Unified reporting in the Ads Console reached general availability in June 2026, with the separate sponsored ads and Amazon DSP report pages set to close on December 31, 2026, while the Reporting API and Amazon Marketing Stream stayed in beta.

The naming has not settled either. The release note refers to the "Amazon Ads console." The September 29 launch announcement said campaigns are created and managed in Amazon Ads Agent, the name Amazon gave its combined advertising platform on September 29, even though the conversational agent of the same name was still in closed beta at the end of October. The release note does not mention Ads Agent at all.

A third wording for the 1,000 cap

The eligibility line has shifted again. The September 29 announcement set eligibility at fewer than 1,000 total ratings and reviews, and said campaigns pause once a product reaches a ratings threshold of 1,000 reviews. The release note says "fewer than 1,000 total reviews." On Amazon, a star rating submitted without text and a written review are different things, and a product can carry far more ratings than reviews. If star-only ratings count toward the cap, a listing leaves the programme sooner than if only written reviews count. The note does not say which applies.

The cap also bounds what any one product can be billed for. On PPC Land's reading, a listing with 200 ratings and reviews has room for at most 800 more before its campaigns pause, and every unprompted review that arrives in the meantime uses up part of that room. Amazon has not set out the arithmetic in these terms.

The cap positions Review Requests at the start of a listing's life, the stage where Amazon's other review mechanisms also concentrate. Amazon Vine, the invitation-only programme in which reviewers chosen by Amazon receive free products, targets the same early period. The release note does not say how Review Requests and Vine interact for the same item.

The pool of eligible listings may also be larger than a year ago. Amazon restricted review sharing between product variations in a change announced on January 7, 2026 and rolled out by category from February 12 to May 31, 2026. Only variations with minor differences, such as colour, pattern, same-function size or pack quantity, kept sharing reviews, which left some child listings standing on their own, smaller counts.

"Highest-traffic pages," the phrase both Amazon texts use for the placement, is still not defined. The card has a name, but its location on Amazon does not appear in the note.

No new performance data

The release note contains no results. The only performance figure Amazon has published for Review Requests is still the September claim that products in a closed beta received three times as many ratings and reviews per week as before the test. That figure rests on internal data from June 3 to 21, 2026, a 19-day before-and-after comparison with no disclosed sample size, as PPC Land reported in October.

The billing answer reframes that number. With payment tied to each rating or review, the commercial test for an advertiser is no longer reach or clicks but the price of each response compared with the reviews a listing would have gathered anyway. Amazon has published neither the price nor the baseline.

The format arrives as Amazon's advertising growth slows. The company's advertising revenue grew 11% to $19.64 billion in the third quarter of 2026, less than half the 26% rate of the second quarter, a slowdown Amazon attributed mainly to Prime Day moving into June. Review Requests adds a new kind of paid placement on Amazon's busiest pages, priced on an outcome that sellers previously pursued through free tools and unprompted buyers. How much it contributes will depend on prices Amazon has yet to disclose.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Amazon Ads, and US sellers, vendors, agencies and software vendors that manage Amazon advertising through the Amazon Ads API.

What: Review Requests, an ad format that shows a "How was your item?" card inviting verified purchasers to rate or review a product, is available in beta through the Amazon Ads API. Advertisers can create and manage campaigns, select products, and set a bid and a daily budget, and they pay only when a shopper leaves a rating or review. Review-specific metrics are available only in the Amazon Ads console until a later beta update brings them to the reporting API. Eligibility is limited to products with fewer than 1,000 total reviews.

When: The release note is dated November 16, 2026, and was listed in the Amazon Ads API release notes on November 12. Amazon first announced Review Requests on September 29, 2026, and gave no date for the reporting update.

Where: The United States, on what Amazon calls its highest-traffic pages.

Why: The API release lets advertisers manage review invitations inside the same automated systems they use for other Amazon campaigns, and the release note gives the first statement of how the format is billed. It leaves open what the bid represents, whether a rating and a written review are charged separately, the price of each response, and when review results will be available to automated tools.