Limit is not off.

Happy Friday,

On Monday, Amazon put your Sponsored Products ads inside off-Amazon creator content. Product reviews, editorial roundups, buying guides. Every existing campaign was enrolled automatically at its current bid and its current budget.

Then Amazon gave you a setting.

The setting is called Settings for ads served off Amazon. It has two options.

Increase reach. That's the one you were put on.

Limit off-Amazon spend. That's the other one.

Read those again and notice what isn't there.

There is no off. There is no disable. There is no do not serve my ads in other people's content. There is more, and there is less. The vocabulary of the control panel does not contain the concept you actually want.

The second lever is a deny list — websites, apps, individual creator tags. That's a blocklist. Blocklists are the control you're given when the default is yes and the burden of saying no is yours, one entry at a time, forever, against inventory that grows faster than you can enumerate it.

So: your placement bid adjustments don't apply off-Amazon. Your Top of Search multiplier, the one you spent two years tuning, stops at the edge of Amazon. Off-Amazon, the base bid is the whole bid.

The clicks come out of the daily budget you already set. The budget did not grow.

The search terms in your report aren't search terms, because nobody searched — a buying guide isn't a query. Amazon infers a string and files it in the same column as the ones real humans typed.

And the setting that would stop all of it doesn't exist.

There is no off. There is more, and there is less. The vocabulary of the control panel does not contain the concept you actually want.

Except it does exist. Just not where a reasonable person would look for it.

An Amazon community manager, answering sellers in a forum thread, mentioned that you can open a case with Ads Support and request removal from off-Amazon placements entirely.

Not a setting. Not a checkbox. Not a line in the help documentation. A support ticket, disclosed in a forum reply, for the one action a meaningful number of advertisers are going to want.

Blocklists are the control you're given when the default is yes and the burden of saying no is yours, one entry at a time, forever.

Here's the pattern worth naming. Amazon ran this exact play in August 2023, pushing Sponsored Products onto Pinterest, BuzzFeed, Hearst Newspapers, Raptive and Ziff Davis. Amazon's own words at the time: advertisers "do not need to take any action to appear on these sites or apps." There was no opt-out at all. Campaign-level off-Amazon controls didn't show up for roughly two years.

So the sequence is consistent. The surface expands. The default is on. The controls arrive late, arrive partial, and arrive named in a vocabulary that describes volume instead of consent.

Read that as cynicism if you like. But the button says Limit, and it says Limit for a reason. A button that said Off would get pressed.

Your titles are being rewritten by something that isn't you. The 75-character cap is live and Amazon started generating AI title recommendations on non-compliant listings July 27 — extended to Amazon's own retail listings on August 3, which is at least consistent. Brand Registry buys you a 14-day window to review what the machine proposes, with approval as the default state. Miss the window and the machine's read of your keyword priority becomes your keyword priority.

August 24 — you can't assign it, Amazon can. The Business Solutions Agreement update bars transferring your rights or obligations under the agreement and expressly bars pledging them as collateral. Attorneys reading it say that reaches revenue-based financing secured by your disbursements and quiet handovers on exit. Reported May 29. The clause text isn't public, which is becoming a theme.

The peak fee didn't move. Your Christmas did. October 15 through January 14, roughly $0.32 per unit above non-peak, on top of the standing 3.5% surcharge — flat year over year. What moved is the calendar. AWD receive-by for Prime Big Deal Days is September 2. FBA is September 9 or September 16 depending on splits. Black Friday runs October 14, 21, 28. Same money, less time.

You already know what to do about this one setting. Tuesday covered it.

The better question is how many others there are.

Here's the exercise, and it takes one person an hour. Build the default register — every place Amazon set a state in your account this year that you did not choose. One row each. Four columns: the setting, its current default, whether anyone on your team ever made a decision about it, and who owns it now.

Start with these five, because they're all live right now:

Off-Amazon placements. Default Increase reach since Monday, every campaign, at existing bids and budgets.

Alexa for Shopping. Existing sponsored campaigns are automatically eligible to serve inside AI shopping conversations. Nobody opted in. Amazon's own framing on the Q2 call: shoppers who click those prompts convert 48% more often and spend 21% more. It works, which means it stays.

Ad payment method. If you were in the group Amazon contacted directly and you didn't state a preference before August 1, the default became deduction from your seller or vendor account balance. Check whether anyone answered that email.

AI title rewrites. Drafts are sitting in Review Listing Changes on non-compliant listings with a 14-day clock and approval as the default state. Silence is consent, on a countdown.

FBA New Selection Program. The inverse — benefits were granted automatically and they stop on October 31 unless somebody actively confirms enrollment. Same mechanic, opposite direction, same outcome if nobody's watching.

Then add every row your own account turns up. Auto-targeting you never reviewed. Inbound placement splits. Automated pricing rules somebody set in 2023 and left. Anything where the honest answer in column three is nobody.

Artifact: a one-page default register with an owner on every row. Column three is the one that matters — count the blanks, because that number is how much of your account is currently being run by whoever shipped the last update.

Amazon shipped a volume knob and called it a control.

Now go count how many other things you never agreed to.

See you Tuesday.

Any questions? Book a meeting with me here.

Dan Head

Founder, AMZ Elite