Amazon Sponsored Products are the paid listings that sit inside Amazon's search and category results, styled to look almost exactly like the organic results around them. Ask a shopper to point out the adverts on a laptops page and most will struggle, which is precisely the point. In June 2026 we measured how much of the consumer-electronics shelf those placements occupy: 26.9 percent of Amazon UK category-page listings were sponsored, the highest share of any retailer we monitor, in any country.
This article covers what Sponsored Products are, the June numbers across the UK, Poland and South Africa, why the sponsored share changes how you should read your own rankings, and what brand teams should do about it.
Sponsored Products are Amazon's core retail-media format: cost-per-click adverts for individual products, served inside search results and category pages. A brand or seller bids on keywords or on other products, and when the bid wins, their product card is inserted into the results a shopper is already browsing.
The design is deliberately native. A Sponsored Products placement uses the same card as an organic listing: same photo, same title, same price, same review stars, same delivery badge. The only visible difference is a small grey "Sponsored" label, and plenty of shoppers never register it. From the advertiser's side, it is a bottom-of-funnel ad served at the moment of choice. From the shelf's side, it is an organic slot that no longer exists.
Amazon also sells Sponsored Brands (the banner with a logo and several products at the top of results) and Sponsored Display, but Sponsored Products is the volume format. It is also what our numbers below capture: listings inside category pages that carry a paid marker.
Crawlbot scrapes retailer category pages hourly and records every listing with its position and a sponsored flag, detected through retailer-specific markers. A listing here is one product in one position on one category-page scrape, so the percentages below describe the shelf as shoppers actually saw it through June, not a single snapshot.
| Retailer | Market | Sponsored Share (June 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon UK | UK | 26.9% |
| Amazon South Africa | South Africa | 16.2% |
| Takealot | South Africa | 14.4% |
| Komputronik | Poland | 13.6% |
| Currys | UK | 7.1% |
| Argos | UK | 6.1% |
| Media Expert | Poland | 3.2% |
| John Lewis | UK | 1.8% |
| Very, Box, Scan, Overclockers, Ebuyer, Laptops Direct | UK | 0% |
Three things stand out. First, Amazon runs the most heavily monetised shelf in every market where we track it. On Amazon UK, more than one listing in four is paid. Amazon's South African marketplace, still young, is already at 16.2 percent, ahead of the local incumbent Takealot at 14.4 percent. Wherever Amazon arrives, it brings the densest retail-media programme on the shelf with it.
Second, the rest of the UK shelf is nowhere near those levels. Currys at 7.1 percent and Argos at 6.1 percent run established retail-media programmes, John Lewis sells a modest 1.8 percent, and a whole tier of retailers (Very, Box, Scan, Overclockers, Ebuyer, Laptops Direct) carried no sponsored placements at all in June. We broke this pattern down retailer by retailer in how much of the UK digital shelf is sponsored.
Third, Poland sits in between. Komputronik at 13.6 percent is closer to Takealot than to Currys, Media Expert runs a light 3.2 percent, and the rest of the Polish shelf is near zero. If you sell there, our piece on retail media on the Polish shelf covers who is building a programme and who is not.
The percentage is not a curiosity about ad load. It changes what your other numbers mean.
Every paid slot displaces an organic one. A category page has a fixed number of positions a shopper will scroll through. When 26.9 percent of them are sold, organic listings are pushed down by exactly that much. A product that ranks fifth organically on Amazon UK does not sit fifth on the page: sponsored cards inserted above it push it further down, sometimes off the first screen entirely. Organic rank on Amazon therefore understates true competition. Your product is not only competing with the products that outrank it, it is competing with every budget willing to pay for the slots above it.
The same budget buys radically different shelf share on different retailers. On Amazon UK you are bidding into the most crowded auction we track. On Currys or Argos the sponsored shelf is thinner, so a placement carries more relative weight on the page. And on the zero tier there is nothing to buy at all: your position on Scan or Ebuyer is a clean read of organic strength, and so is your competitor's. Planning retail-media spend without knowing each retailer's sponsored share means pricing a slot without knowing how many slots exist.
Blended visibility numbers hide all of this. A share-of-voice figure that mixes paid and organic listings will show a competitor gaining visibility when what actually happened is that they raised their Sponsored Products budget for a month. The two signals mean different things and cost very different amounts, which is why we always report them separately. If the distinction is new to you, start with our explainer on organic versus sponsored share of voice.
None of this is an argument against buying Sponsored Products. On a shelf where a quarter of the positions are paid, sitting the auction out simply hands those positions to competitors. It is an argument for measuring the shelf properly before spending on it.
Crawlbot tracks the consumer-electronics digital shelf hourly across the UK, Poland, South Africa and the Nordics: roughly 7.4 million listings a month across 34 retailers. Sponsored detection uses retailer-specific markers, because every retailer labels paid placements differently. A listing is one product in one position on one category-page scrape. All figures above come from June 2026 category-page data; the full retailer-by-retailer and brand-by-brand breakdown is in the free monthly report.
7.4 million listings, 34 retailers across the UK, Poland, South Africa and the Nordics. Free monthly report: brand rankings, sponsored split, content benchmarks.
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