A new browser extension guarantees to point out you which of them merchandise in your Amazon search outcomes are bought by manufacturers which can be both owned by or are unique to Amazon, providing you with a greater concept of who’s promoting what you’re shopping for. It’s known as Amazon Brand Detector, and it makes use of a listing of Amazon manufacturers created by The Markup, together with filters and different methods (detailed here) to detect and spotlight merchandise which can be part of Amazon’s Our Brands program.

The Markup created this extension after its investigation into how Amazon ranks its in-house manufacturers in search outcomes and says the instrument (accessible for Chrome-like browsers and Firefox) is designed to make searches extra clear. When we examined it, it clearly highlighted Amazon Basics and Essentials merchandise, however it additionally drew consideration to outcomes that have been in any other case indistinguishable from ones not affiliated with Amazon: a canine leash labeled as being made by Panykoo, socks by Teebulen, a sweater by Ofeefan.

While Amazon marked a few of these outcomes as “featured from our brands,” that wasn’t the case for all of them. That advisory textual content can be small and gray, making it straightforward to overlook for those who’re casually shopping (particularly since there is probably not any discover of the affiliation on the precise product web page), and it didn’t present up on each outcome the instrument highlighted.

Amazon isn’t essentially shadowy about these manufacturers: it has a page that lists its “private and select exclusive brands,” a lot of which have legit-sounding names: Happy Belly, Wag, Nature’s Wonder. Some are personal labels owned by Amazon, the place some are “curated selections” bought completely on Amazon however not essentially operated by the corporate.

Clicking via to the shop pages, there’s a spectrum of Amazon branding. Basic Care has a big Amazon brand proper on the prime, Stone and Beam notes that its merchandise are “exclusively on Amazon,” and Rivet’s product names are prefixed with “Amazon Brand.” Meanwhile, Amazon’s branding doesn’t seem on the Goodthreads page until you watch to the top of a video titled “Fall 2021.” Most Goodthreads merchandise may have the phrase “An Amazon Brand” someplace on the web page, however it’s not at all times outstanding.

The web page additionally doesn’t include all of Amazon’s manufacturers — there are letter-soup model names highlighted by Amazon Brand Detector like Weeso and different manufacturers like Daily Ritual, which confirmed up usually in search outcomes. Despite “An Amazon brand” being listed as a function of the Daily Ritual sweater that confirmed up in my search outcomes, that model isn’t on Amazon’s “Our Brands” web page.

As ProPublica points out, conventional grocery shops have lengthy had their very own private-label manufacturers, although shops like Kroger and even Walmart are working on a considerably smaller scale — objects are extra hidden on the third web page of search outcomes than they’re on the underside degree of a shelf. And, as an advisor to third-party Amazon sellers instructed ProPublica, Amazon’s manufacturers take up house within the coveted first web page of search outcomes that would go to different manufacturers (a few of which can have extra optimistic opinions or increased gross sales numbers). Amazon denied favoring its manufacturers in search outcomes, although The Markup has an in-depth investigation into how the corporate weights its outcomes.

For some clients, it might not matter who’s promoting the merchandise, so long as they’re respectable. But for those who’re the type of one that likes to know the place the stuff you purchase are coming from (or who doesn’t need to give Amazon extra money than vital), it might be price putting in the Amazon Brand Detector extension. At the very least, the outcomes might find yourself being attention-grabbing — there have been a couple of occasions throughout testing once I went, “Huh… I wouldn’t have guessed that was from Amazon.”

The Markup says the extension “does not collect any data” and that it must be suitable with different extensions, resembling ones that search for faux product opinions.