Something is shifting inside Amazon Seller Central, and a growing number of seven-figure merchants say the numbers don’t lie. Conversion rates on formerly stable listings are dropping. Buy Box percentages are eroding without obvious pricing causes. And sponsored placements that once reliably defended organic rank are suddenly delivering diminishing returns. The chatter in private Slack groups and at the Prosper Show afterparties has coalesced around a single phrase: Project Granite.
Sources close to the matter say Amazon has been quietly piloting an internal initiative — internally referred to as “Granite” by at least two former Amazon category managers — that algorithmically elevates Amazon-owned and Amazon-exclusive brand listings across high-margin verticals including home goods, kitchen, pet supplies, and personal care. The initiative is reportedly tied to Amazon’s broader margin recovery push following a difficult 2024 fiscal year in which its North American retail segment underperformed internal benchmarks.
Amazon has not confirmed the existence of any such program, and a spokesperson declined to comment for this article. But the seller community is anything but quiet.
What Exactly Is Project Granite — and Is It Real?
The rumor, which has been circulating in seller circles since roughly Q1 2026, alleges that Amazon’s retail and marketplace teams have developed a scoring model that assigns weighting bonuses to ASINs tied to Amazon’s own label portfolio — brands like Amazon Basics, Solimo, Mama Bear, and the newer Compass Rose line — when determining organic rank and Buy Box eligibility. This would be categorically different from ordinary Buy Box suppression, which is typically triggered by pricing violations or fulfillment metrics.
“What sellers are describing isn’t a bug,” said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, who has been tracking Amazon’s private label footprint for nearly a decade. “If the algorithm is baking in a preference signal for first-party inventory at the category level, that’s a structural change that would be very difficult for third-party sellers to counter with standard tactics.”
“We had a kitchen category listing that had been stable at a 14% conversion rate for eight months. In March it fell to 8.2% with zero changes on our end — no pricing shifts, no review drops, no listing edits. We’ve since been told by our Amazon account rep that ‘category dynamics are evolving.’ That’s not an answer.” — Carrie Huang, founder of NovaCook Brands, a $4.2M FBA kitchen accessories seller
Huang is not alone. In a private Facebook group for Amazon sellers with more than 22,000 members, a thread titled “Anyone else getting crushed in home goods since February?” has accumulated over 340 comments, with dozens of sellers reporting similar unexplained organic rank degradation. Notably, many report that Amazon Basics or Solimo listings now occupy the top three organic positions in categories where third-party sellers held those spots for years.
Are Amazon’s Own Brands Getting Algorithmic Favoritism?
This is the central allegation — and it’s legally and regulatorily charged territory. Amazon has faced sustained scrutiny from the FTC, the EU’s Digital Markets Act enforcement body, and multiple Senate subcommittees over alleged self-preferencing. In 2024, Amazon settled a portion of the FTC’s antitrust case related to Prime enrollment practices but the private label favoritism allegations remained unresolved.
Sources reportedly familiar with Amazon’s internal product roadmap suggest that Project Granite, if it exists as described, is structured to avoid the explicit “seller data exploitation” framing that drew regulatory fire. Instead, it allegedly operates through what one source described as “organic quality scoring” that happens to correlate strongly with first-party inventory signals — things like fulfillment origin, return rate benchmarks calibrated to Amazon’s own distribution capabilities, and “brand trust” scores derived from internal datasets third-party sellers cannot access or replicate.
“If Amazon is running a black-box quality score that systematically favors its own labels using data that only Amazon has, that’s self-preferencing by another name,” said Sally Hubbard, director of enforcement strategy at Open Markets Institute, who has followed Amazon’s marketplace practices closely. “The DMA in particular has teeth here, and EU enforcement teams will be watching Q2 seller data very carefully.”
“The sophistication of what’s allegedly being described — using proprietary return rate data, fulfillment origin signals, brand trust scores — means that no third-party seller could ever close the gap. It’s a race where the track keeps moving.” — Sally Hubbard, Open Markets Institute
Which Seller Categories Are Being Hit Hardest?
Based on anecdotal reports aggregated from seller communities and corroborated by data pulled from tools including Helium 10 and DataHawk, the categories showing the most anomalous rank shifts since January 2026 include:
- Kitchen & Dining: Multiple mid-tier FBA sellers report organic rank drops of 15-40% on previously stable listings; Amazon Basics cookware and storage products showing corresponding rank gains.
- Pet Supplies: The Wag brand (Amazon-owned) has reportedly gained significant top-of-search real estate in dog food, treats, and accessories, with third-party sellers in the $80K-$300K/month revenue range reporting the steepest losses.
- Personal Care & Grooming: Solimo listings are unconfirmedly taking Buy Box positions at price parity with third-party FBA sellers, which would represent a departure from Amazon’s stated price-competitiveness framework.
- Home Storage & Organization: An Amazon-exclusive line reportedly launched under the AmazonCommercial banner in late 2025 is now allegedly placing in organic positions 1-3 across dozens of high-volume storage search terms.
Interestingly, sellers in electronics accessories and apparel report minimal disruption — categories where Amazon’s own label presence is thinner and where brand differentiation from third parties is harder to replicate at scale.
How Are Major Sellers and Aggregators Responding?
The rumored dynamics are reportedly causing significant anxiety inside the Amazon aggregator community, which spent 2022-2024 reeling from the acquisition bubble collapse and is only now stabilizing. Thrasio, which has reportedly stabilized its portfolio around roughly 120 active brands following its bankruptcy restructuring, is said to be conducting an internal audit of all listings showing organic rank degradation above a 10% threshold since Q4 2025.
Sources close to Thrasio’s current leadership say the company’s data science team has flagged a pattern it cannot explain through conventional variables — pricing, reviews, competitor entry, or seasonality. A Thrasio spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
Perch, another aggregator with a reportedly leaner post-restructuring portfolio, is said to be accelerating its multichannel diversification strategy in direct response to Amazon dependence concerns. Sources suggest Perch is actively evaluating Walmart Marketplace and TikTok Shop as primary channels for at least a subset of its catalog — a significant strategic shift for a company built almost entirely around Amazon optimization.
“Every aggregator that bet everything on Amazon is now having a very uncomfortable conversation about what happens if the platform’s thumb is on the scale in a way they can’t counter. Multichannel isn’t optional anymore — it’s existential insurance.” — a senior operations executive at a top-10 Amazon aggregator, speaking on condition of anonymity
What Are Amazon PPC Agencies Seeing in the Data?
Several Amazon advertising agencies contacted for this piece — including representatives from Incrementum Digital and Orca Pacific — say they are observing anomalous patterns in sponsored product auction dynamics that may be consistent with the Granite rumors, though they are careful not to overinterpret noisy data.
Specifically, agencies report that in certain home goods and pet supply subcategories, CPCs have spiked 22-35% since February without corresponding increases in search volume, suggesting that third-party sellers are being forced to bid more aggressively to hold positions they previously held organically. If Amazon’s own brands are receiving an organic rank boost, the downstream effect would be exactly this: third-party sellers over-investing in paid placements just to maintain visibility they once held for free.
“We’re running scenarios where a brand that was profitable at a 25% ACoS is now needing to operate at 38-42% ACoS just to maintain category presence,” said one agency director at a firm managing over $40M in annual Amazon ad spend. “At that level you’re not building a business, you’re subsidizing Amazon’s data collection.”
What Should Sellers Do Right Now?
Even if Project Granite is never officially confirmed, the seller community’s response is already shaping practical strategy. Conversations across Prosper Show Slack channels, the Amazon Seller Facebook groups, and private mastermind communities are coalescing around a few tactical responses:
- Audit organic rank vs. paid rank gaps: If your organic rank is degrading while your paid placements hold, that’s a signal worth investigating. Tools like Helium 10’s Rank Tracker and DataHawk’s ASIN performance suite can surface the divergence.
- Accelerate external traffic strategies: Amazon’s Attribution program and the associated Brand Referral Bonus (currently a 10% bonus on attributed sales) become more valuable if organic placement is being compressed. Driving external traffic via Meta or TikTok and capturing the bonus is a partial hedge.
- Expand to Walmart Marketplace now, not later: Walmart Fulfillment Services has improved meaningfully in 2025-2026, and Walmart’s marketplace is reportedly actively offering reduced referral fees in key home and pet categories to attract FBA sellers looking for channel diversification.
- Document everything: Sellers with evidence of unexplained rank suppression are being encouraged by marketplace attorneys to preserve screenshot records and performance data. Several class-action plaintiff firms are reportedly already conducting preliminary intake conversations with affected sellers.
- Engage your Amazon Selling Partner API data: Cross-referencing ASIN-level performance data through the SP-API against category-level trends can help isolate whether suppression is ASIN-specific (fixable) or category-wide (structural).
For now, Project Granite remains unconfirmed — a rumor with enough texture and corroboration to command serious attention, but not yet a documented fact. What is documented is the seller data: rank declines, rising CPCs, and an aggregator community suddenly very interested in diversification. Whether Amazon’s algorithm is the cause or merely the backdrop, the message for FBA-dependent sellers is arriving clearly regardless of the label attached to it.
Ecommerce Times has reached out to Amazon’s Selling Partner Communications team and has not received a response as of publication.
