• by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday

Amazon has abruptly pulled out of product advertising on Google Shopping, marking its most significant retreat in years.

Average shopping-ad impression shares for Amazon from July 21- July 23, 2025 in the U.S., the U.K. and Germany fell to zero among Tinuiti’s clients, from 60%, 55%, and 38%, respectively.

“Amazon is officially gone from shopping auctions,” says Andy Taylor, vice president of research at Tinuiti, analyzing the amount spent by the agency’s clients. He believes this shift in the Google Shopping ad space in Q2 2025 opens “a rare window of opportunity for retail brands.”

While Amazon has slowly reduced its presence in Google Shopping during the past year, the sudden halt raises questions about the company's motives.

It could signal an AI search turf war, according to Tinuiti analysts. With the strong rollout of Rufus and generative answers, Amazon wants full-funnel control before Google’s Performance Max takes control, according to data released by Tinuiti, a large independent full-funnel marketing agency.  

“Cost per clicks will fall as the whale leaves the pool,” Tinuiti analysts wrote in a research note, adding: “Rivals can benefit from lower CAC, boost LTV and rewrite market share math before Amazon decides whether this was a test, or the new normal.”

Taylor said in Q2 2025, Tinuiti advertisers saw the strongest Google shopping ad-click growth since the first half of 2022, with ad impressions freed up by Temu and Shein dropping out of auctions for a time, and Amazon pulling back significantly in the second quarter.

“Given that Amazon is the biggest Google shopping competitor for many advertisers, this could once again provide a major opportunity for other brands to capture traffic in Q3 if the ecommerce giant continues to sit on the sidelines,” Taylor said.

Tinuiti’s anonymized advertiser data suggests this reset in auction dynamics helped push click growth to multi-year highs -- and that brands could benefit even more if Amazon continues to sit on the sidelines in the third quarter.

The most recent data, as of July 23, shows Amazon has fully exited Google Shopping auctions, marking the first full retreat since the early pandemic.

Mark Ballard, director of research, Tinuiti, says: "As of July 23rd (the most recent data available from Google), it looks like Amazon has entirely dropped out of Google shopping auctions for the first time since the early days of the pandemic in 2020."

In mid-Q2 2025, Amazon did cut back its presence in Google auctions for about three weeks before ramping up again prior to Amazon Prime Day.

“The timing of that pullback did not align cleanly with tariff developments, as it did with Temu and Shein pulling back in Q2, so it may have been a test of the incrementality of running Google ads,” added Ballard. “With respect to Temu, we had been seeing them popping back up in Google shopping auctions since the end of June, but it does look like they are starting to ramp up their presence a little over the last two weeks.”

Ballard said Temu is still considering featuring minimal impression share levels in Google Auction Insight reports for its clients, but increasingly they are hitting those thresholds.