One of the hidden metadata gold mines on Amazon Vendor Central is the giant data dump of search terms it provides each week. This is a beast of a CSV file (you can download a filtered book-only version here) that contains over 1 million rows of very rich search and sales data across the entire U.S. site. But in its raw form, this CSV is just too dense to be efficiently usable (and, hence, a perfect use case for AI).

ChatGPT’s answer to a request for relevant search terms for our new adult coloring book using the Amazon Vendor Central data.

Training ChatGPT on this list is as simple as uploading the file (in this case I used a TXT version) and asking questions of it.

While this is a rudimentary use case for AI and this type of data—and there are plenty of paid sites that can provide you with even more useful analyses—I still think this is one of the most exciting windows into what AI will help editors and marketers do in the months and years to come.

For example, if you go back to that first query about coloring books for adults, you’ll notice that “halloween coloring books for adults” is currently ranked #30,971 in all search terms for all products on Amazon. Depending on when you’re reading this, that might not sound impressive; but right now, it’s August and it’s currently 93 degrees in NYC (yes, I know Michael’s is probably decked out for October 31 already). To this marketer, late October just isn’t on my radar and, so, I find it invaluable to our company to tap into objective consumer data rather than rely on my own ignorance. And when AI gets powerful enough in the years to come, I will be feeding these massive datasets to an AI assistant every week and asking it to identify search terms that are just now starting to trend—long before human marketers, like me, think of including them in metadata or placing advertising buys on customer interest that still seems several months off.

By combining multiple weeks of search ranking data, we can see how “Halloween coloring book for adults” trends over time. Based on the 2023 data, the best time to push discoverability will be mid-September.

(If you are looking for how to download Amazon Vendor Central’s search terms, here’s a video)