Two Amazon changes landed close enough together that most sellers have only noticed one of them. The first is good news and free. The second is a compliance rule buried in your image files, and getting it wrong can pull a listing out of search.
Premium A+ Content is now open to Brand Registered sellers in Seller Central without the old barriers. No invite, no waitlist, no minimum spend, no requirement to have published a stack of standard A+ projects first. The modules that used to sit behind a vendor relationship or a big budget, video, hover hotspots, interactive comparison tables, are available to a two-person brand selling one product.
The second change is the one to read carefully. Since late July 2026, sellers have had to tag images and A+ content containing photorealistic AI-generated people before uploading them.
The rule, in plain terms
If an image or video in your listing or A+ content contains a photorealistic AI-generated person, you have to declare it in the file’s metadata. Specifically, the keyword contains-synthetic-performer goes into the dc:subject (XMP) field, which you set with an IPTC-compatible metadata editor before upload. Amazon then shows a customer-facing indicator on the image.
It does not apply to images of real people, even heavily edited ones. It does not apply to non-photorealistic illustrations, cartoon characters, or images with no people in them. Forbes reported on Amazon’s requirement to label AI-generated people in listing images, which follows New York’s synthetic performer disclosure law that took effect in June.
The consequence for skipping it is not a warning email. Amazon can flag the media, and a listing whose main image is non-compliant can be suppressed from search until it is fixed. For a seller whose entire revenue runs through one ASIN, that is the difference between a normal Tuesday and no Tuesday.
Why these two changes belong in the same conversation
Premium A+ becoming free means a lot more sellers are about to build a lot more image-heavy content, quickly, on a budget. The cheapest way to fill a comparison module or a lifestyle banner is a generated model. So the exact population that just got access to the format is the population most likely to trip the disclosure rule, and least likely to have anyone checking image metadata.
That is the practical risk. Not the rule itself, which is reasonable and narrow. The gap between a free creative upgrade and a technical compliance step that lives in a file field nobody on a small team has ever opened.
The workflow that prevents the problem
The fix is a process change, not a tool purchase.
Decide the policy once, per image type. Product-only shots, no people, no issue. Lifestyle shots, decide now whether you use real photography, licensed stock of real people, or AI-generated people. Pick one per category and write it down. Ambiguity is what causes the miss.
Tag at creation, not at upload. If someone generates an image with a person in it, the metadata goes in at that moment, in the same session. Tagging at upload time means the person doing the upload has to remember which of forty files had a generated model in it. They will not.
Keep a source column in your asset list. One spreadsheet column: real photo, licensed stock, AI-generated, AI-edited real person. That single field answers the compliance question in a second and survives staff turnover.
Audit what is already live. If you have used generated people in the past year, those assets are sitting in current listings. Go back through them before Amazon does.
Where I would not rush
Free access to Premium A+ does not mean it is automatically worth building. The modules take real design work, and a badly built premium module converts worse than a clean standard one. Amazon has also introduced a quality scoring layer that looks at completeness, image quality and module mix, so a rushed job is now visible rather than just ineffective.
If you sell a simple, well-understood product where buyers decide on price and reviews, the upgrade may add very little. Premium A+ earns its keep on products that need explaining: technical specs, sizing, comparisons across a range, anything where a buyer is choosing between your three variants and cannot tell them apart.
Start with your one highest-revenue ASIN. Build it properly. Measure the conversion rate before and after. Then decide whether the catalogue is worth doing.
The wider signal for anyone not selling on Amazon
A disclosure rule that lives in file metadata rather than in a checkbox is a preview of where this is going. Platforms are moving from asking whether content is AI-generated to reading whether it says so about itself, at the file level, automatically. YouTube went down a similar path with its originality rules for AI video. Amazon is now doing it for still images.
Marketing teams that cannot answer “where did this asset come from” for every file in their library are going to keep meeting rules they cannot comply with. The provenance question is not a legal nicety anymore. It is becoming an operational requirement, and the teams that logged it from the start are going to find the next three years much cheaper than the ones who did not.
If you have generated people anywhere in your Amazon catalogue, check those files this week. The rule is already live, and the enforcement mechanism is search suppression, not a friendly nudge.
Editor’s note: This area changes quickly, so check the latest platform policy before making compliance decisions.