On September 17, Senators Tammy Baldwin and Rick Scott sent a bipartisan letter to the Federal Trade Commission asking it to investigate Amazon over how Alexa for Shopping handles Made in USA products. The letter cites a Columbia Law School study called "Made in America, Hidden by AI," which found that the chatbot could identify US-made products in its inventory but declined to surface them under certain search conditions, including when a shopper explicitly asked for a "Made in USA" filter.
The study's authors tested the chatbot with specific phrasing and found that slight variations produced different results. When asked for a "Made in USA" product, Alexa for Shopping said it couldn't access that information. When asked for products made in China, it provided a list with purchase recommendations. When the researchers tweaked the phrase to "made in USA" rather than "Made in USA," the filter worked, which they interpreted as evidence of an intentional suppression of the full phrase rather than a technical limitation. Amazon denied the characterization, telling Reuters that it doesn't intentionally withhold country-of-origin information and that the chatbot directs shoppers who ask about origin to the product detail page. The FTC declined to comment.
Why This Matters for Brand Sellers
The immediate regulatory question, whether the FTC investigates and what it finds, is months away at minimum. What matters for brand sellers right now is the underlying audit question the letter surfaces: are your Made in USA claims on Amazon defensible, and are they consistent across your listings, A+ Content, and advertising?
Amazon's own policies already require that Made in USA claims meet the FTC standard, which means the product must be "all or virtually all" made in the United States. That standard covers the product itself and its components and processing. A product assembled in the US from imported parts generally does not meet the standard unless the imported content is negligible. The FTC has been increasingly active on origin-claim enforcement, and Amazon was already on notice: the FTC sent letters to Amazon and Walmart last year flagging third-party sellers' false Made in USA claims on their platforms.
The Senate letter adds a second dimension that's specific to AI discovery. If the FTC does investigate and finds that Alexa for Shopping handles origin queries differently by design, the downstream effect for sellers is that AI shopping assistants may become a new surface where origin claims are verified or flagged rather than simply passed through. That's a different operating environment than the current one, and brands that have been imprecise about their origin language are more exposed in it than brands that have kept their claims accurate and documented.
What to Audit Before This Moves Further
The practical response for brand sellers isn't to wait for an FTC decision. It's to treat this as a prompt to verify that your existing claims hold up under scrutiny. That means reviewing every ASIN where a Made in USA claim appears in the title, bullet points, A+ Content, or product description, and confirming that the claim matches the product's actual manufacturing origin and component sourcing. If the claim has been on the listing for years without a recent review, this is the moment to check it.
The study also noted that Alexa for Shopping was able to detect false Made in USA labels when specifically asked, and disclosed that at least one false label came from Amazon itself rather than a third-party seller. That finding suggests the AI layer on Amazon's platform has more origin-claim visibility than the default search experience shows. Whether or not that leads to proactive enforcement, it means brand sellers shouldn't assume that inaccurate origin claims will continue to pass through AI-mediated discovery surfaces without scrutiny.
For brands that sell genuinely US-made products, the reverse concern is worth noting too: if the study's findings reflect a real suppression pattern in how Alexa for Shopping handles origin queries, that's a discoverability problem for authentic US manufacturers who are trying to reach shoppers actively filtering for domestic goods. Our content optimization for AI search work increasingly involves making sure that product attributes like origin, materials, and certifications are structured in ways that AI shopping surfaces can read and surface reliably. That's a different challenge than keyword optimization, and it's one that's becoming more consequential as AI mediates more discovery.
If you want to review your catalog's origin claims or think through how your listings are positioned for AI-mediated discovery, schedule a call and we can work through where the gaps are.