Get found in AI search

Same store, same second: a browser gets 200, an unknown bot UA gets 429, and the real crawler UAs pass. Four reproducible experiments on what Shopify's edge actually does, including the one where the blocked party was our own tool.

Six Japanese beauty stores, six live buyer prompts: one shop was recommended on a broad question and absent from the prompt that literally describes its business. AI visibility is won question by question, with the data to prove it.

Three identical runs, same questions, same three engines, nothing changed in between. The cited or not cited verdict held 45 out of 45. The list of competitors taking our place kept 1 domain out of 9. What that means for any AI visibility report you are shown.

We audited and live-tested six real DTC stores. The two highest scorers were never named by ChatGPT, while a lower-scoring shop was. Why a high AI-readiness score and a real citation come apart, with the data.

On-page fixes get you ready; off-page is what earns the citation. The channels that most predict AI citations, ranked, with the first move for each: review platforms, roundup listicles, Reddit, YouTube and PR.

ChatGPT recommends products by reading schema.org, not your marketing copy. The exact product attributes that decide your AI visibility, why completeness beats presence, and how to fill the gaps on Shopify.

Your store is probably already readable by AI, and still not recommended. Why technical scores don't win citations, and the four levers that do: answer content, FAQ schema, roundup mentions and a consistent brand entity.

The foundational guide: what AEO is, why it matters now, how it differs from SEO, how answer engines decide what to cite, and the core levers to get quoted by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.

ChatGPT now answers before users click. Here is the full playbook to become a source it quotes: clear answers, structured data, llms.txt, clean technical SEO, and consistency across the web.