We know this is a lie because it worked pretty well until like 2015? 2020?

It is hard to say either way I think…

Amazon sellers, lots of them don’t work for Amazon, right? Their incentive is to show up in searches, and the one who takes the reputation hit when they game the system and show up in the wrong search is mostly Amazon, not them. So, it would 0% surprise me if Amazon was just losing to the malicious subset of the parties being indexed, like Google is.

Not saying this is definitely the case, but it seems like a plausible alternative theory.

And, it probably won’t get better. In 2015 these companies were at the tail end of being new and interesting. In 2025 they are the slow entrenched incumbents.

> Amazon was just losing to the malicious subset of the parties

No, this is by design. Amazon has no problem whatsoever in banning sellers that do things they don't like. It definitely helps Amazon to keep this state of things.

I wonder if somebody will come along to defend that position that your edited version of my post is proposing. It would be interesting to see somebody defend it (I’m not interested in doing so, though).