Do hyphens affect Amazon keywords?
Hyphens in Amazon keywords behave differently from most other punctuation. Rather than being ignored entirely or causing an error, Amazon's indexer treats a hyphen as a word separator, functioning in the same way as a space. This means that entering 'non-stick' in your Search Terms field is broadly equivalent to entering 'non stick': your listing becomes indexed for both the hyphenated and space-separated versions. Understanding this behaviour helps you avoid unnecessary duplication in your backend keywords and make better use of the limited byte space available. Amazon's A9 indexer tokenises listing content into individual word units when building its search index. When the indexer encounters a hyphen between two words, it treats the hyphen as a separator and indexes the resulting tokens both separately and as a compound. For example, 'fast-drying' is processed as 'fast', 'drying' and the compound 'fast-drying'. This means a shopper searching for 'fast drying towel' and a shopper searching for 'fast-drying towel' will both have their query matched against a listing that contains the hyphenated form. For sellers, the practical implication is that you do not need to fill your Search Terms field with both hyphenated and space-separated versions of the same phrase. Amazon handles the variation automatically. Entering 'fast-drying' once is sufficient to cover both search patterns. If your Search Terms field includes both 'fast-drying' and 'fast drying', you are not gaining additional indexation but you are consuming extra bytes unnecessarily. Each character in your Search Terms field counts towards the 250-byte limit, including hyphens. A hyphen consumes one byte, the same as a letter or a space. In practical terms, 'fast-drying' uses 11 bytes, while 'fast drying' also uses 11 bytes: the hyphen and the space have the same byte cost. There is therefore no byte-saving advantage to removing hyphens from compound terms in your backend Search Terms field, but there is also no byte cost to including them. What you should avoid is entering both the hyphenated and the unhyphenated version of the same term: 'fast-drying fast drying' wastes 12 bytes on a variation that Amazon's indexer would have handled automatically from the single hyphenated entry. Auditing your existing backend keywords for this kind of accidental duplication is a useful exercise, particularly for listings that have been updated by multiple contributors over time. In your listing title and bullet points, hyphens follow Amazon's style conventions rather than a dedicated keyword optimisation logic. Amazon recommends using hyphens in titles where they reflect natural product naming conventions, such as 'XL Non-Stick Air Fryer Accessory Set', rather than stuffing multiple hyphenated variants. The same indexation logic applies: the hyphenated form in your title indexes both the split and compound versions, so there is no need to repeat the unhyphenated version in your bullet points for indexation purposes. Where hyphens appear in trademarked product names or standard industry terminology, use them as they would naturally appear: accuracy in product naming carries its own SEO benefit because buyers searching for the correct product name will see an exact match to their search query, which is a positive relevance signal. Avoid artificially inserting hyphens into terms where they do not naturally belong, as this makes listing copy harder to read without providing any indexation advantage.
Hyphens in Amazon keywords act as spaces, meaning hyphenated terms index both joined and split versions. Learn how to use them effectively in your listing.