Harpy Glossary

AHR (Account Health Rating)

Amazon & D2C glossary · Harpy Media

The AHR (Account Health Rating) is Amazon’s 0–1,000 score summarizing how safely you behave as a seller — defects, violations, and compliance aggregated into one number, tracked over a rolling window, with a threshold below which automated enforcement begins.

What is AHR?

Think of it as a credit score for your seller account: easy to lose points, slow to rebuild them, and consulted before anyone lets you do anything interesting. A healthy score is invisible insurance; a failing one converts small mistakes into account-level events.

How the score moves

You start with a baseline, gain margin from sustained good performance, and bleed points for policy violations, IP complaints, and performance defects — weighted by severity. The rolling window means old issues eventually age out, which cuts both ways: yesterday’s mistakes stop hurting eventually, but there’s no fast lane back. Critical violations can drop the score hard enough that recovery takes months of clean trading.

What to do when it drops

Read the dashboard’s violation list first — the rating follows the underlying issues, never the reverse. Fix and appeal each one (a proper Plan of Action for anything serious), then let the window do the healing. What you cannot do is buy, charm, or rush the score back — which is precisely why the rational strategy is never letting it fall: weekly dashboard checks, documented compliance, and instant response to every yellow flag.

In practice

A seller takes an IP complaint (honest mistake — a supplier photo contained a licensed logo). AHR drops 180 points. They remove the image, submit a corrective POA with new photography, and — the part most sellers skip —audit every other listing for the same supplier imagery. Score recovers over six weeks; the audit prevents the second complaint that would have been fatal.

⚠️ Watch out. A seller watches the AHR slide from 780 to 420 “because it’s still above the line.” One more defect arrives — nothing dramatic, a couple of A-to-Z claims — and the account is deactivated with a score that shows months of ignored warnings. Amazon’s appeal reviewers read that history; recovery is slow precisely because the warnings were visible the whole time.

💡 Harpy tip. Treat any 100-point drop as an incident: same-day root-cause, same-week fix. Small drops are cheap lessons; big drops are semesters.

How Harpy Media helps

We watch AHR as a leading indicator for every account we manage — the score is the story of your operation’s discipline, and we keep ours boring.

AHR FAQ

What is the Account Health rating?

A 0–1,000 score aggregating your defects and policy compliance; below Amazon’s threshold, automated enforcement begins.

How do I improve my AHR?

Fix and appeal underlying violations, run clean operations, and let the rolling window age out old issues — there is no shortcut, which is the point.

How fast does AHR recover?

Weeks to months depending on severity — the rolling window heals slowly. Prevention is the only fast strategy.

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