What Does Amazon's Choice Mean? What the Badge Does and Doesn't Tell You

Badges are among the first things you see in Amazon search results. They're useful shortcuts, but each one answers a narrower question than most shoppers assume.

What Amazon's Choice Means

Amazon has described the program as recommending "highly rated, well-priced products available to ship immediately," as GeekWire reported in 2018 (GeekWire).

That year, Amazon began listing the reasons behind individual picks. The reasons GeekWire found included:

• Highly rated: a high average rating, or a large share of 4- and 5-star reviews.
• Low return rate: fewer returns than similar products.
• Popular item: popular with shoppers searching for a particular term.
• Prime delivery: eligible for fast Prime shipping.

Some of these reasons point to a specific search: a product can be picked because it's popular with people searching for a particular term.

Can sellers buy it? No. GeekWire, citing CNET's reporting, said the designation can't be purchased by a seller. Amazon has never published its full formula, and in 2019 two US senators wrote to Amazon asking how the badge is chosen, whether employees review the items, and how Amazon checks the reviews behind it (CNBC).

Amazon's Choice vs. Overall Pick vs. #1 Best Seller

Amazon search results can show several badges, and they aren't the same thing.

What the three have in common: none is described as a check on whether a product's reviews are genuine. Two of them lean on star ratings, and a star rating is only as reliable as the reviews behind it.

Can a Listing Get the Badge With Borrowed Reviews?

It has happened. In 2023, the FTC alleged that supplement maker The Bountiful Company used Amazon's "variation" feature to merge new products onto the pages of established ones. That gave the new products the older products' ratings and reviews, and with them badges such as "#1 Best Seller" and "Amazon's Choice." An internal message quoted by the FTC said the company wanted to "borrow" the Amazon's Choice and Best Seller badges. Bountiful agreed to pay $600,000 (FTC).

This tactic is called review hijacking. Check 4 in our 9-checks guide shows how to spot a listing whose reviews describe a different product.

What to Check Before Trusting a Badge

Treat a badge as a starting point, then look at the reviews behind it:

• Read the oldest reviews, and filter by the variation you're buying, to make sure they describe this product.
• Look at when the reviews arrived. A burst of 5-star reviews in a short window is a warning sign.
• Compare the rating with the review count. A high rating on few reviews, for a cheap, recently listed product, deserves a closer look.
• Look for repeated phrases across several reviews.

Our 9-checks guide covers each check in detail. For a faster second opinion, paste the product's Amazon link into the FakeFind review checker. You'll get a Trust Score from 1 to 10 for how much you can trust the reviews, and the FakeFind Rating, Amazon's star rating with the suspicious reviews discounted. It's free and needs no account.