Overview

Amazon will begin enforcing a new set of review‑sharing rules in early 2026, with the rollout spreading across categories through mid‑year. The changes clamp down on long‑standing tactics such as merging discontinued ASINs, pooling reviews across unrelated variations, and exploiting the Vine program. Sellers who rely on these shortcuts need to audit their catalogs now to avoid forced delistings or loss of review equity.

Key Points

• Variation‑based review sharing tightened — Reviews will move only between child ASINs that deliver essentially the same customer experience, not merely those linked by a catalog variation.
• Discontinued‑ASIN merges banned — Carrying review histories from retired listings into brand‑new products by merging them is now expressly prohibited.
• Artificial review pools blocked — Creating separate products, gathering reviews individually, then consolidating them under a single parent will trigger enforcement.
• Vine manipulation outlawed – Using temporary ASINs to enroll in Vine, collect reviews, and later merge them into a main listing to bypass Vine caps is treated as fraudulent.
• Bundles isolated from singles — Review sharing between multi‑item bundles and their individual component listings will cease, as Amazon deems the shopper experience different.
• Legitimate variations untouched — Color, size, quantity, or fitment variations that truly reflect the same product will continue to share reviews under the new policy.

What's Changing

1. Customer‑experience test for review transfer — Amazon will evaluate each child ASIN against its siblings; for example, a blue‑shirt and a red‑shirt of the same style will still share reviews, but a shirt paired with a matching hat will not.
2. Automatic block on discontinued‑ASIN merges — If a seller attempts to merge a retired model that once held 150 five‑star reviews into a brand‑new SKU, the system will reject the merge and strip any transferred reviews.
3. Prohibition of review‑pooling variations — A seller who launches three separate kitchen‑gadget listings, gathers 30 reviews on each, and then combines them under one “Ultimate Kitchen Set” parent will see the combined reviews removed and may receive a policy violation.