We regularly take over Amazon accounts where the client has been pouring budget into Sponsored Products for months, watching ACOS climb, and assuming the problem is the bids, the keywords, or the competition. Then we open the listing itself and find three bullet points instead of five, one low-resolution image, no A+ Content, and a title that reads like it was written for a 2015 algorithm. The ads were never the problem. The listing underneath them was.
Amazon has a name for this now: the Listing Quality Score. It is a single, visible rating of how complete and optimised a listing is — and it has a direct, measurable relationship with how far your ad spend goes. This guide explains what it actually measures, where to find it, and exactly how to fix a low one.
The short version: the Listing Quality Score is Amazon's own audit of your listing's completeness. It does not set your ad rank directly, but every input it checks — images, bullets, A+ Content, title structure, backend keywords — is also an input into conversion rate, organic ranking, and Amazon's ad relevance model. A low score is a reliable early warning that your ad spend is being wasted on a listing that cannot convert the traffic it buys.
What Is the Listing Quality Score?
The Listing Quality Score is a percentage-based rating Amazon assigns to each ASIN, based on how well the listing meets Amazon's content and completeness standards. It checks things like whether you have the full complement of bullet points, whether your main image meets resolution and background requirements, whether backend search terms are populated, whether A+ Content is live, and whether the title follows Amazon's style guidance rather than being stuffed with repeated keywords.
It is Amazon's way of flagging listings that are technically live and sellable, but structurally incomplete in ways that quietly suppress both organic visibility and conversion rate — the two things every PPC campaign depends on to perform.
Where to Find Your Listing Quality Score
Depending on your account and marketplace, the score surfaces in one or more of these places:
- Manage All Inventory — a quality or completeness column/flag against individual ASINs
- Listing Quality Dashboard — a dedicated Seller Central report (where rolled out) showing a score per ASIN with specific gaps listed
- Account Health → Product Policy Compliance — flags listings with content gaps that are also compliance-relevant
- Automated notifications — Amazon periodically emails sellers about ASINs with low scores and specific missing elements
If you cannot find a dedicated score for your marketplace yet, you can reconstruct the same signal manually: check each of your top ASINs against the factor list below. The underlying content gaps are the same whether or not Amazon shows you a number for them.
What Actually Feeds the Score
Amazon has never published an exact weighting, but based on what consistently moves a score up or down across the accounts we manage, the main inputs are:
Why a Low Score Is a PPC Problem, Not Just a Listing Problem
As a PPC agency, we care about Listing Quality Score for one reason: every factor it measures also moves conversion rate, and conversion rate is the single biggest driver of your ACOS. You cannot fix a conversion problem by adjusting bids. You can only mask it, expensively, by overbidding to force more impressions through a leaky funnel.
A missing fifth bullet point or a non-white main image is not a cosmetic issue. It is a direct tax on every click you pay for. If your Sponsored Products campaigns are sending 500 clicks a day to a listing with a 60% quality score, you are paying full price for traffic that converts at a fraction of what it would on a complete listing — and every optimisation you make at the campaign level is working against that handicap.
There is a second, less obvious effect. Amazon's organic ranking and ad relevance systems both draw on the same underlying content signals — keyword presence in title and bullets, image count, A+ Content engagement. A listing with a low quality score tends to also rank weaker organically, which pushes a seller to rely more heavily on PPC to compensate. The ad spend goes up precisely because the content gap was never closed. We see this pattern constantly: accounts stuck in a cycle of rising ad spend that a half-day of listing work would have prevented.
Reading Your Score: What Good, Average, and Poor Look Like
✅ 90–100%: Strong
All content fields complete, A+ Content live, image count and quality above minimum. PPC traffic lands on a listing built to convert it. Focus shifts to testing and incremental optimisation.
⚠ 60–89%: At Risk
One or two meaningful gaps — often missing A+ Content, thin bullets, or an underfilled backend search term field. Conversion rate is being held back without the seller necessarily noticing why.
❌ Below 60%: Leaking Spend
Multiple core elements missing or non-compliant. Any PPC spend directed here is materially less efficient than it should be, regardless of how well the campaigns themselves are built.
How to Fix a Low Listing Quality Score
Audit Every ASIN Against the Factor List
Go through title, bullets, images, A+ Content, backend search terms, and variation structure for each live ASIN. Do not assume a listing is complete just because it has been live for years — older listings are frequently the worst offenders, built before current content standards existed.
Fix Images First
Images move conversion rate more than almost any other factor, and they are usually the fastest fix. Get the main image fully compliant on a pure white background, then add lifestyle, dimension, and infographic images up to the maximum Amazon allows.
Rewrite Thin or Duplicated Bullets
Every bullet should lead with a genuine benefit, not a repeated keyword phrase. If a bullet reads like filler, a shopper will skip past it — and so, functionally, does Amazon's quality check.
Build or Refresh A+ Content
If you are Brand Registered and A+ Content is not live, this is usually the single highest-impact gap to close. Use comparison charts, lifestyle modules, and FAQ blocks — not just the default single-image layout.
Populate Every Backend Search Term Field
Fill backend keyword fields with relevant synonyms, spelling variants, and use-case terms that do not fit naturally in the front-end copy. This supports both organic indexing and the content-completeness checks feeding the score.
Fix in this order: images, bullets, A+ Content, backend terms. This is also, not coincidentally, roughly the order of impact on conversion rate. If budget or time is limited, start at the top and work down — do not spread effort evenly across all five factors at once.
Common Mistakes We See
- Treating listing content and PPC as separate workstreams. They are not. A PPC audit that does not check the listing underneath the ads is an incomplete audit.
- Assuming an old, stable listing is still compliant. Content standards change; a listing built three years ago can score poorly today without anything having been “broken” by the seller.
- Leaving A+ Content as the generic default. A text-only A+ module technically counts as “live” but delivers almost none of the conversion benefit of a properly built one.
- Scaling ad spend on a low-scoring ASIN to “push through” weak conversion. This almost always raises ACOS rather than fixing the underlying problem, and trains Amazon's algorithm on worse conversion data than the listing is capable of.
- Fixing content once and never revisiting it. New images, policy changes, and competitor movement mean listing quality needs the same ongoing review cadence as bids and keywords.
How We Handle This at StoreStride
Every account audit we run checks listing completeness alongside campaign structure, because the two cannot be separated and still produce an honest ACOS diagnosis. When we find a low-scoring ASIN carrying meaningful ad spend, listing optimisation gets prioritised ahead of further PPC changes — there is little point tightening bids on a funnel that is leaking at the bottom. Our listing creation and optimisation work is built to clear every factor in the quality check as a baseline, not a target to aim for afterwards.
Not sure if your listings are holding your ACOS back?
Our free account audit checks listing quality and campaign performance together — so you see the real reason behind wasted ad spend, not just the campaign-level symptoms. Get in touch today.
Get Free Amazon PPC Audit →Common Questions About the Listing Quality Score
Does the Listing Quality Score directly affect my ad rank or CPC?
Not directly. Amazon's ad auction is driven primarily by bid and relevance to the search query. But the same content factors behind the quality score — images, bullets, A+ Content — drive conversion rate, and conversion rate strongly influences both your organic ranking and the long-run efficiency of your ad spend. The relationship is indirect but significant.
Can a low score cause a listing suppression?
A low quality score on its own is a flag, not a suppression. However, several of the same gaps it measures — particularly missing required attributes or policy-non-compliant images — can separately trigger a full listing suppression. Treat a low score as an early warning to fix content before it escalates into a compliance issue.
How quickly does fixing content improve the score?
Amazon typically re-evaluates listing content within 24–72 hours of an update, though full reindexing of search-relevant fields like backend search terms can take up to a week to be fully reflected in organic placement.
Does this apply to Vendor Central as well as Seller Central?
Yes, in a similar form. Vendor Central tracks listing completeness through its own content quality and Retail Readiness style metrics, measuring largely the same underlying factors — images, A+ Content, title and bullet compliance — even where the exact reporting interface differs from Seller Central.