How to see what your Amazon competitors are doing

How can I see what my Amazon competitors are doing?

Three sources, in descending order of certainty. Your own Amazon Ads reports show search-term impression share and where you are losing placements you already pay for. Amazon's public surface -- search results, listings, Buy Box, review counts -- is observable by anyone and is what scraping tools resell. Everything above that, including competitor revenue and market share, is estimated from Best Sellers Rank and should be read as direction rather than fact. Pick the cheapest source that answers your question.

Marketplace Ad Pros publishes this guide and is one of the tools named in it. Tools are compared on features, pricing, and public documentation. We earn a commission if you subscribe to SmartScout through our partner page; that arrangement did not determine what appears here or in what order.

Last updated: September 15, 2026

Start by deciding which question you are asking

"Competitor research" covers three jobs that want different tools, and vendors use the terms interchangeably because on Amazon the underlying data overlaps heavily.

	What it asks	Unit	Cadence
Market intelligence	How big is this category and where is demand heading?	The category	Periodic
Competitor analysis	What is this named rival doing?	One rival	One-off exercise
Competitive intelligence	What are my rivals doing that should change what I do?	A rival set	Continuous

The practical difference is not which tool you buy. It is whether you are answering a question once or watching something every week. A one-off category sizing before a product launch and a standing watch on who is bidding on your brand name are different purchases, and the second one is where subscriptions earn their money.

What you can actually see, and what you cannot

Sort every claim a tool makes into one of three buckets before you pay for it.

Tier 1 -- your own account. Exact. Your Amazon Ads reports carry search-term impression share and top-of-search impression share, which tell you the proportion of available impressions you won on a term. With Brand Registry, Brand Analytics and Search Query Performance give you your share of impressions, clicks, cart adds, and purchases for a search query against the total for that query. That total is the competitive part: it is every other seller, aggregated. This data is free with the accounts you already have, it is exact, and most sellers have not read it.

Tier 2 -- the public marketplace. Observable. Search results, sponsored placements, listing content, prices, Buy Box ownership, review counts, seller storefronts, and the "frequently bought together" graph are all visible to anyone with a browser. Tools in this tier are selling you scale and history: they look at the same pages you could, but continuously and across millions of ASINs, so you get a trend line instead of a snapshot.

Tier 3 -- modelled estimates. Inferred. Competitor revenue, units sold, brand market share, and category size are not published by Amazon to anyone. They are derived from Best Sellers Rank through a category model. These are the numbers that get quoted in board decks and they are the ones to handle most carefully.

And one thing nobody has: competitor ad spend. Amazon does not expose another advertiser's budgets or bids. A tool reporting how often a brand wins a sponsored placement is reporting share of visibility, which is useful, but converting that into an implied budget is an assumption you cannot check.

Five checks worth running

1. Who is taking your branded impressions. Pull your search-term report, filter to terms containing your brand, and look at impression share rather than ACOS. A branded term where you are winning a low share of impressions means someone is contesting it. Your reports show the symptom; they do not name the advertiser. Search the term yourself to see who it is.

2. Where you are losing the placements you already pay for. Top-of-search impression share on your highest-spend terms tells you whether you are buying the position you think you are. This is usually the fastest money on this list, because you are already bidding on these terms.

3. Whether your funnel or the market moved. Search Query Performance breaks a query into impressions, clicks, cart adds, and purchases, with your share at each stage. A falling purchase share with flat impression share is a listing or price problem. Falling impression share is a ranking or bidding problem. Reading only total sales conflates the two.

4. Who else is in the subcategory. This is the first check that needs a tier-3 tool, because it asks about brands you have no relationship with: who else sells here, who is growing, and which sellers are on your listings. If you sell wholesale or have a reseller problem, the seller-to-brand join is the thing worth paying for.

5. Whether AI assistants recommend you. Shoppers increasingly ask an assistant for a recommendation rather than searching. This is genuinely new competitive ground, it is measurable, and almost nobody is watching it. Our AEO guide covers the optimization side.

Tools, by which question they answer

Your own data, free. The Amazon Ads console and Brand Registry's Brand Analytics cover checks 1 through 3 at no cost beyond the accounts you already have. Start here. Most of the value people buy tools for in year one is sitting unread in these reports.

Marketplace Ad Pros -- your own Ads and Selling Partner data queried in plain English or SQL through Claude and ChatGPT, which is checks 1 through 3 without exporting anything. On active Launch, Boost, and Dominion plans it also tracks share of voice on search terms you nominate. It reads your accounts only and does not model other sellers. $10/week to $999/month.

SmartScout -- the strongest fit for check 4. It models four layers of the marketplace (brands, sellers, 40,000+ subcategories, products) and the joins between them, so you can search a brand and get every seller carrying it, or search a seller and get every brand they carry. That seller-to-brand join is the thing it does that product-research suites do not. $49/month (Basic), $119 (Essentials), and $299 (Business) billed monthly; $29, $99, and $239 per month on annual billing. Enterprise is custom. Read the tier boundaries before buying: seller-level and subcategory-level data start on Business, while Ad Spy and Share of Voice are Enterprise-only, and the API and data lake are paid add-ons on top of Enterprise with no self-serve keys. Their AI Visibility Monitor covers check 5 by running your prompts against ChatGPT through the day and reporting a visibility rate, rank, and the domains it cites. (Pricing checked against SmartScout's own pricing page on 2026-09-09. Note their page displays annual rates by default.)

Helium 10 and Jungle Scout -- seller suites that bundle competitor and keyword research with product research, which suits you if you want one subscription rather than a dedicated stack. Helium 10 prices Platinum at $129/month billed monthly or $99/month billed yearly, and Diamond at $359/month billed monthly or $279/month billed yearly, plus a 2% fee on ad spend managed through Helium 10 Ads. Jungle Scout starts from around $49/month (reported).

Keepa -- the reference for price, Buy Box, and sales-rank history on any ASIN, including products you do not sell. Subscriptions from around EUR 19/month. Marketplace Ad Pros has a live Keepa integration: bring your own API key and query that history next to your own campaign data in the same conversation.

For the wider vendor field, including the enterprise and raw-data options, see our Amazon market intelligence tools guide.

How much to trust a revenue estimate

Every tier-3 number in this category comes from the same place: Best Sellers Rank, run through a model of how rank converts to units in that category. That is worth knowing because it tells you where the error comes from. Rank is real and observable; the conversion to units is modelled, and it varies by category, by price point, and by how fast the category itself is growing.

SmartScout's founder puts the honest version of this on their own site: "If the single point of value to you is the revenue number that SmartScout puts next to a brand, then SmartScout might not be the tool for you." They claim 80 to 90 percent accuracy on most brands and products, and note that roughly 5 percent of products carry no sales rank at all and so get no estimate. Treat that as representative of the category rather than a knock on one vendor.

The practical rule: estimates are reliable for comparison and unreliable for accounting. Brand A is roughly three times Brand B, and this subcategory grew while that one shrank, are conclusions the model supports. "Our competitor did $1.4M last month" is not, and it is the version that ends up in a slide.

Where Marketplace Ad Pros fits, and where it does not

We publish this guide, so here is the boundary. Marketplace Ad Pros reads your accounts. It is built for checks 1 through 3, where the data is exact and the question is what your own money is doing. It computes TACOS, ACOS, and ROAS across ads and Selling Partner data, and answers questions about your search terms, impression share, and funnel in Claude or ChatGPT without an export.

It does not model other sellers' revenue, it has no view into anyone else's account, and it will not tell you what a competitor spent. For check 4, and for the brand and seller layer generally, you want a tool built to model the market from the outside -- and the two are complements rather than alternatives, because neither can do the other's job. That is why we recommend SmartScout on our partner page rather than building a version of it.

Frequently asked questions

Can I see how much my competitors spend on Amazon ads?

No, and any tool implying otherwise is estimating. Amazon does not expose another advertiser's spend, budgets, or bids to you in any report or API. What you can observe is placement: which brands appear in sponsored slots for a search term, and how often. Tools that sell competitor ad data are sampling search results and reporting how frequently a brand wins a placement, which is a share of visibility rather than a dollar figure. That is genuinely useful for deciding which terms to contest, but it is not spend, and turning a win rate into an implied budget adds an assumption you cannot check.

How accurate are Amazon competitor revenue estimates?

Directionally useful, not exact. Almost every estimate you will see is derived from Best Sellers Rank run through a category model, so accuracy varies by category and by how fast a product sells. SmartScout, one of the larger providers, publishes a claim of 80 to 90 percent accuracy on most brands and products and notes that roughly 5 percent of products carry no sales rank at all and therefore get no estimate. Two tools can disagree on the same ASIN because they model the same rank differently. Read market share and direction of travel rather than the absolute number, and cross-check anything you plan to act on against first-party data.

Can I see who is bidding on my brand name?

Partly, and from two directions. Your own Amazon Ads search-term reports show branded terms where your impression share is lower than you would expect, which is the symptom. Amazon does not name the advertisers taking those impressions. To see who they are, you either search the term yourself and look at the sponsored results, or use a tool that samples search results continuously and reports which brands appear. The first is free and a snapshot, the second is paid and a trend. Start with the symptom in your own reports, because if your branded impression share is healthy there is nothing to chase.

What is the difference between market intelligence and competitive intelligence?

Cadence and unit of analysis, mostly. Market intelligence asks how big a category is and where demand is heading, and its unit is the category. Competitor analysis is a one-off exercise about named rivals, usually producing a document. Competitive intelligence is the continuous version: a standing watch on a set of rivals that feeds decisions as they come up. On Amazon the underlying data overlaps heavily across all three, which is why vendors use the terms interchangeably. The practical difference is not which tool you buy, it is whether you are answering a question once or watching something every week.

Do I need a paid tool to research Amazon competitors?

Not to start. Your own Amazon Ads reports already carry search-term impression share and top-of-search impression share, which tell you where you are losing placements you pay for, and those are free with an advertising account. Brand Registry adds Brand Analytics and Search Query Performance, which show your share of impressions, clicks, and purchases for a search term against the total. Searching a term yourself in an incognito window costs nothing and answers who is in the sponsored slots today. Paid tools buy you two things those cannot give you: history you did not collect, and data about brands and sellers you have no account relationship with.

Can Marketplace Ad Pros show me competitor data?

Only from inside your own account, which is a real limit worth stating plainly. Marketplace Ad Pros reads your Amazon Ads and Selling Partner data, so it can tell you which search terms you are losing impression share on, how your Search Query Performance share moved, and where your spend is going. On active Launch, Boost, and Dominion plans it also tracks share of voice on search terms you choose. It does not model other sellers' revenue and it has no view of anyone else's account. For the market around you, pair it with a tool built for that job.