Shoppers now ask an assistant what to buy. You cannot see those conversations in your analytics, so most merchants have no idea whether they come up in them.
You can find out. It takes about ten minutes and costs nothing.
Check 1: ask the assistants directly
Open ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google. Ask each one the question a shopper would ask, not a question about you:
- "What are the best [your product type] under [your price]?"
- "Where can I buy [the thing you sell] in the UK?"
- "Compare [your brand] with [a competitor]."
Write down whether you appear, who does appear, and what the assistant says about you. That last one matters. Being described wrongly is worse than being absent.
Check 2: is your store even readable?
Open yourstore.com/robots.txt in a browser. Look for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended.
If any of them is followed by Disallow: /, you have blocked that assistant from reading your store. Some stores did this in 2024 when the advice was to keep AI out. That advice has aged badly for retailers.
The big stores we measure now explicitly allow all of them.
Check 3: what your product page actually tells them
Assistants do not look at your photography. They read a block of data in your page code. So does Google.
Open a product page in Google's Rich Results Test. Look at what comes back.
We read that block on six well known Shopify stores this month. Five sent no rating at all. Their reviews sit on the page where shoppers can see them, and never reach the machines. One store showed "29 Reviews" to shoppers while telling Google nothing.
Why the rating matters more than it looks
Put yourself in the assistant's position. It has ten stores selling a similar thing. Three of them tell it the price, the stock status and a rating from two thousand buyers. Seven give it a product name.
It recommends the three. Not because they are better, but because it can describe them without guessing. An assistant that is unsure says less, and saying less means you are not mentioned.
Tools that track it for you
The checks above give you one reading, on one day. Assistant answers change from week to week. If you want to watch the trend, a few tools now do that job.
- Semrush and Ahrefs have added AI visibility reports to their SEO suites. Good if you already pay for one.
- Profound, Peec AI andOtterly.AI do only this. You give them the questions your shoppers ask, and they record which brands each assistant names.
All of them measure the result. None of them changes it. A tool can tell you that a competitor is named and you are not. It cannot tell you that your product pages send no price or rating, and that is usually the reason. Run the three checks first. Pay for tracking after the fixes, so you can see them work.
What to fix, in order
- Unblock the assistants in robots.txt if you blocked them.
- Add the rating and review count from your reviews app into the product data. This is the single biggest gap we find.
- Add stock status. Without it, assistants and Google send people to sold-out products.
- Add a product code, so an assistant can tell your listing from a reseller's.
- Write descriptions on your product images. Assistants and Google both read them to understand what the picture shows.
All of it uses data you already hold in Shopify. It is theme work, done once, and it does not change how the store looks.
What not to bother with
You will be sold "AI SEO" packages. Most of it is the same structured data work described above, at four times the price. There is no secret channel and no way to pay for placement in an assistant's answer.
The work is unglamorous: tell the machines the truth about your products, in the format they read.
If you would rather not do the checks yourself, send us your store address. We will run them and send you what we find, free, and we will say so plainly if your store is already fine.