Amazon Review Requests: What Brands Need to Know from unBoxed 2026

Amazon is giving brands a new way to build one of the most important assets on the marketplace: reviews.

Announced at Amazon Ads unBoxed 2026, Review Requests is a new ad format designed to encourage customers who have already purchased a product to leave a review.

The open beta is due to launch at the end of October 2026.

And unlike traditional advertising, brands only pay when a customer actually submits a review.

How do Amazon Review Requests work?

The concept is relatively simple.

Brands choose the products they want to promote and set a budget. Amazon then targets customers who have already purchased the product and are eligible to leave a review.

The customer receives a prompt to review their purchase.

Amazon says customers must have purchased the product and received it at least a week earlier, meaning the programme is focused on genuine purchasers rather than simply generating additional impressions.

The resulting review remains a standard verified-purchase review.

There's also no requirement for brands to create new advertising creative. Review Requests use existing product imagery.

Why does this matter?

Reviews have always played an important role in Amazon conversion.

For a new product, however, there's an awkward gap between launching and building enough review volume to give shoppers confidence.

Amazon already has Vine to help brands generate early reviews.

Review Requests potentially adds another mechanism further down the launch journey.

Amazon says products in its trial generated 3x more ratings and reviews per week.

That makes this particularly interesting for products that are still building their review base.

Which products should brands consider?

Amazon's own positioning makes Review Requests particularly relevant for new and recently launched products with fewer than 1,000 reviews.

That doesn't mean every product should automatically be enrolled.

The value will depend on the product, its existing review profile, conversion rate and the wider launch strategy.

For brands with established products and thousands of reviews, the incremental value may be very different from a product trying to establish itself.

What does this mean for brands?

The bigger shift is that reviews are moving further into the advertising conversation.

Historically, brands have largely treated reviews as something that happens after purchase.

Review Requests creates the possibility of treating review generation as something that can be actively planned and supported.

That means brands should start thinking about:

• Which products are eligible?

• Which products would benefit most from additional review volume?

• How does Review Requests fit alongside Vine?

• How much budget should be allocated?

• How will increased review volume affect conversion and advertising efficiency?

What should brands do now?

The beta opens at the end of October, so there's an opportunity to prepare before it becomes another last-minute Amazon feature to investigate.

We'd start by identifying products that:

• Have relatively low review volume

• Are recently launched or have recently relaunched

• Have strong underlying customer satisfaction

• Already have a clear launch or growth strategy

Then build Review Requests into that plan rather than treating it as a standalone campaign.

The takeaway: Amazon is giving brands another lever to actively build social proof.

The brands that get the most from it will likely be those that understand where review generation fits into the wider product and advertising journey rather than simply turning it on because it's new.