Amazon says 92% of winning ad bids weren't the highest bid submitted. The FTC's complaint is about how the auction worked, not which bids won.
Amazon issued a detailed public response to the Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of state attorneys general over its Sponsored Ads auction practices, disputing the core of a complaint filed last week. The company said it "strongly disagrees" with the allegations and called them "misguided."
Amazon's rebuttal leans on specific, company-reported figures. Advertisers saved more than $8 billion from 2021 through 2025 because of its relevancy-based auction design rather than a pure high-bid-wins model, the company said, and roughly 92% of placed ads were not the highest bid submitted, with winning bids averaging around the 128th-ranked bid by amount. Amazon also said the FTC's complaint "cites no evidence of consumer price increases," and said consumers save more than $230 a year on average through its deals and programs.
Those numbers cut against the complaint's "secret surcharge" framing more directly than the market's roughly 2% reaction to the original suit suggested investors expected. They don't fully answer it, though. The FTC alleges Amazon marketed its auction as a second-price design while running it as a first-price auction closer to 80% of the time by 2024, a claim about how the mechanism worked. Amazon's "92% not the highest bid" statistic addresses which bids won, not what kind of auction produced those outcomes, and both claims can be true at once.
Amazon also acknowledged the FTC questioned whether its advertiser communications adequately explained changes to the auction mechanism, arguing the specific materials at issue had limited reach.
The figures above are Amazon's own, drawn from its defense and not independently audited. Investors weighing the market's muted initial reaction should treat Amazon's rebuttal as a serious, quantified defense rather than a settled answer, and watch how the FTC responds to the auction-mechanism allegation the company's statement doesn't directly rebut.