Shoppers are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI to pick products for them. See whether those answers include your store — and fix what they miss.
The shift
For twenty years, winning search meant ranking in a list of blue links. That's changing. A growing share of shoppers now ask an AI assistant — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews — to find, compare, and recommend products directly. The assistant reads the web, then answers with a short list of specific stores and products.
If your store isn't in that answer, you're not on page two — there is no page two. The model names a handful of options and the shopper picks from them. Being unreadable to AI today is what being invisible on Google was a decade ago: not a missed ranking, a missed market.
The catch is that AI assistants don't see your store the way a customer does. They don't see your design, your animations, or your brand feeling. They lean on your structured data, your product information, how accessible your site is to AI crawlers, and the trust signals around you — and most stores have never been built for that reader.
The five signals
"AI visibility" isn't one setting. It's five signals that shape whether an assistant can find, understand and trust your store. ecomspy's AI visibility toolkit covers all five; the free scan above runs four quick checks — structured data, llms.txt and AI-crawler access, page speed, and trust signals.
AI parses schema markup, not your CSS. Missing or broken Product, Offer, and Review schema makes your pages hard for the model to read.
Thin, inconsistent, or incomplete product information gives the assistant nothing specific to recommend you for.
llms.txt is an emerging, proposed standard: a plain file that gives AI agents a curated map of the pages on your site that matter. It's cheap to add, and few stores have one yet.
Assistants weigh experience, expertise, authority, and trust before citing a source. Weak trust signals get you filtered out.
Content structured to be quoted — clear questions, direct answers, scannable facts — is what generative engines tend to surface.
SEO · AEO · GEO
They're related, not interchangeable.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the classic game: earn a high rank in a list of links on Google or Bing. The payoff is a click to your site.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is optimizing to be the answer an engine gives — the store ChatGPT, Perplexity, or an AI Overview names when a shopper asks. The payoff isn't a rank; it's a citation.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) goes one step further: structuring your content so generative models can pull from it and generate a recommendation that features you — in product round-ups, comparisons, and "best X for Y" answers.
Traditional SEO still matters, but it's no longer the whole board. AEO and GEO decide whether you exist inside the AI answers that increasingly sit above the old results — and that's ground very few ecommerce brands have optimized for yet.
Paste your store URL. ecomspy runs an instant AI-readiness check on four things — your structured data (schema), llms.txt and AI-crawler access, page speed, and trust signals — and returns a plain-English score plus the single thing costing you the most visibility. Your first scan is free — no signup.
The toolkit
Five tools, each targeting one part of AI visibility. Run them free.
Why ecomspy
ecomspy reads your actual live store and writes an evidence-based report — the kind a $5,000 consultant would hand you — with findings quoted from your own pages and fixes you can paste straight in. AI visibility is the frontier we're built for: the AI Catalog Optimizer, SEO/AEO/GEO Hub, and LLMs.txt Validator are made specifically for it. Free to start with 5 free runs per month across all 23 tools, or $25/mo for unlimited runs.
Everything you need to know
See your AI-readiness score in seconds, then fix what's keeping you out of the answer. Free to start.