Amazon Ads opens Review Requests: what the new paid review ad means for brands
Amazon Ads announced on September 29, 2026 that Review Requests, a new paid campaign type built to prompt recent buyers for a star rating, enters open beta in the US in late October. It is the clearest signal yet that Amazon is treating review velocity as an ad product, not just a post-purchase email. For brands fighting to get newer or lower-visibility ASINs past the credibility threshold shoppers expect, this is a new lever worth understanding before it goes live.
What Review Requests actually does
The campaign shows a review invitation to customers who recently bought your product while they are browsing Amazon's highest-traffic pages - not buried in an email they might never open. The shopper sees a prompt and can submit a star rating in a single click, with the option to add a written review, photo or video. Amazon has run this in a closed beta and says participating products saw roughly three times as many ratings and reviews per week compared to before the test. Amazon has not published the sample size, categories or ad spend behind that number, so treat it as a promising early signal rather than a guaranteed outcome for every catalog.
Who qualifies, and the 1,000-review ceiling
Eligibility is tied to your advertising account, not just the product. Registered sellers and vendors need an ad console account in good standing with no active policy violations. On the product side, an ASIN only qualifies while it has fewer than 1,000 total ratings and reviews. Amazon checks eligibility both at campaign creation and continuously while it runs, and it pauses the campaign automatically the moment a product crosses that threshold. That makes Review Requests a tool for the growth phase of a listing's life, not something you run indefinitely on an established bestseller.
The fee applies either way
This is the detail worth flagging to anyone budgeting for it: the advertising fee is charged whether the shopper leaves a review or not, and regardless of whether that review ends up positive or negative. What Amazon is selling is the opportunity to reach a recent verified buyer at a high-traffic moment, not a guaranteed review outcome. That is a meaningfully different risk profile than Amazon Vine, which seeds reviews pre-launch using free product units rather than paid impressions against existing buyers.
What this means for brands
Review Requests fills a real gap in the review-building toolkit. Vine works before launch; organic post-purchase emails have low and declining open rates; Review Requests sits in between, targeting buyers who already converted, at the moment they are most likely to engage.
- It is most useful for ASINs still building review count and social proof - new launches, recent relaunches, or SKUs that have historically under-indexed on reviews relative to sales volume.
- Because the fee is charged per impression regardless of outcome, budget it like a test, not a guaranteed-ROI line item, until you have your own performance data.
- Ad console compliance now has a direct tie to review-building eligibility, so policy violations carry a cost beyond the usual ad account risk.
- The automatic pause at 1,000 reviews means campaigns need monitoring so budget does not sit idle on a product that already aged out.
What we do about it
We are mapping client catalogs now for ASINs that sit under the 1,000-review line and would benefit from a push before the open beta's early-access slots fill up. For brands running Vine on new launches, we are planning Review Requests as the handoff campaign once Vine seeding wraps.
If review count has been a quiet drag on conversion for any of your listings, this is worth testing in the first weeks of the beta rather than waiting to see how it performs for everyone else first.
