by Jessica Davies * 10 July 2025 *
Ivy Liu
Conde Nast
Hearst and Conde Nast have signed multiyear agreements with Amazon for the licensing of their content to be used in its AI shopping assistant Rufus.
The announcement comes only six weeks after The New York Times announced its own AI licensing deal with Amazon. This allows Amazon to use content from NYT Cooking, sports website The Athletic and articles from The Times.
Hearst confirmed via a spokesperson that Amazon has a licensing agreement for content to use within Rufus and across its newspapers, magazines, including Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan and Harper’s Bazaar. Conde Nast confirmed that the publisher has a license deal for Rufus.
NYT’s deal with OpenAI, Microsoft and others created waves. Copyright theftThe terms of the agreements with Conde Nast, Hearst, and the NYT are not disclosed, but the first activations for Rufus should be live this summer. Rufus, Amazon’s LLM powered shopping assistant, is trained on Amazon’s catalog of products and information from the web to answer questions about shopping needs, product comparisons, and other related topics. It was launched last year. Matt Prohaska is the CEO and principal at Prohaska Consulting. He said that The New York Times has shown it can play both offense and defense using AI. He also said that publishers who have shopping-related content would be natural partners for Amazon’s LLM goals.
prohaska sailing “Amazon created a commerce media category which everyone else has tried to copy …,”. The overlap between shopping and those [Condé Nast and Hearst] [publishers]and the audiences they attract is huge. Amazon would naturally try to lock up those areas. Many in the industry are still asking: What should this price be?
Commercial models are still evolving. Brian Wieser of Madison and Wall, principal, said that if the agreements were limited and the rights returned to the publishers – and assuming it is possible for an LLM “to unlearn” – the short term benefits would probably be worth it.
Wieser stated that if LLMs are empowered, successful, and able enough to license content from publishers, then many individual outlets’ businesses could be threatened. “However, everything is uncertain,” he said. “It is better to learn and make money in this area than to stay away with nothing to gain.”
Conde Nast, the publisher of Vogue, GQ, and Vanity Fair, and Hearst are both able to provide years of SEO optimized, structured content – the type of clean, consistent and high-quality text that is ideal for AI training. Amazon will also want to use real-world data for training and content that is trustworthy in order to avoid hallucinations and inaccurate answers when it comes to Alexa, Rufus, and other LLM products.
Although few details about the Amazon Rufus deals are available, lifestyle titles such as these, which include gift guides, home hacks, and fashion roundups with product recommendations, make them a strategic fit for Amazon, because their editorial content is naturally mapped to consumer intent. This makes it extremely valuable in powering AI-generated suggestions.
As Amazon Rufus expands into a shopping assistant role, lifestyle publishers such as Conde Nast or Hearst may find themselves directly integrated into the consumer’s decision journey – not through search but through AI driven answers.
This is a natural extension of Amazon’s AI licensing plans. It already has content licenses in place with over 200 publishers, including Conde Nast, Hearst and Hearst for its LLM powered virtual assistant Alexa+. Announced in FebruaryBusiness Insider, Forbes and Reuters are also partners.
According to the press release, “Alexa+ is able to manage and protect your house, make reservations and help you discover and enjoy new artists.” “She can help you find, search for, or buy virtually anything online, and give useful suggestions based upon your interests.” Alexa+ does all this and more — all you have to do is ask.”
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