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Insights

Plain-English guides to AI search and AI shopping for ecommerce brands, plus a glossary of the terms you will hear.

Getting into the answers before peak season

Gift guide answers are decided months ahead. What you can still fix this week, and the January cleanup.

Your AI traffic is hiding in your direct channel

GA4 files much of your AI traffic under Direct. How to find it, and how to read AI conversion numbers honestly.

The twenty questions: how to build the prompt set you track

The five buyer intents, why 20 to 40 prompts beats 200, and how to ask and record them properly.

When AI gets your product wrong, and how to fix it at the source

Wrong facts have addresses. Trace them, keep a ledger, and fix, outdate or answer each one.

Reddit is quietly deciding your category

Why assistants cite community threads, what gets brands removed, and how founders can take part honestly.

The pages that get cited, and the ones that never do

Product pages, guides, how-tos and FAQs get cited. Brand story pages rarely do. Audit yours in an afternoon.

AI agents are starting to buy things. What to fix before they do.

Discovery, recommendation and checkout are three different stages. The five product data fixes that matter now.

Structured data for AI answers: what matters, and what is cargo cult

Organization, Product with Offer and Review earn their place. The rest is often cargo cult.

Your reviews are product copy now

Assistants read the sentences, not the stars. Turn recurring complaints into answers on the page.

One brand, five answers: why AI visibility is not a single number

Answers change by country and language. Why translated pages underperform and how to track per market.

How AI assistants decide which brands to recommend

Why some brands get named and others do not, and the four things you can influence.

AEO vs SEO vs GEO: what actually changes for ecommerce brands

What the three terms mean, where they overlap, and the work that is genuinely new.

Rufus is now Alexa for Shopping. What Amazon sellers should do.

How Amazon's AI assistant reads your listing, and the changes worth making first.

Is your store blocking ChatGPT? A robots.txt check

Five minutes to find out whether AI tools can read your site at all.

What llms.txt is, and whether your store needs one

What the file does, what it does not, and how to write one.

Test your own AI visibility

A free tool that writes buyer prompts for your category and scores how often you appear.

AI visibility glossary

Answer engine optimization (AEO): Improving how often and how accurately AI assistants mention and recommend your brand in their answers.
Generative engine optimization (GEO): Another name for largely the same work, used especially for AI-generated search results such as Google AI Overviews.
AI Overviews: The AI-written summaries Google shows above traditional search results for many queries.
Alexa for Shopping: Amazon's AI shopping assistant. It was called Rufus until May 2026, when Amazon merged Rufus and Alexa+ into one shopping experience.
Share of answers: The percentage of a fixed set of buyer prompts in which your brand is named, usually compared against competitors.
Citation: A source an AI assistant links to or credits when it answers. Being cited sends traffic and signals trust.
Prompt map: The set of real questions buyers ask AI in your category, grouped by intent and used to track visibility over time.
Entity: How AI systems understand your brand as a distinct thing, with a name, category, products and attributes.
Structured data (schema): Code on your pages that states facts in a machine-readable format, such as product price, rating and availability.
llms.txt: A plain text file at the root of your site that summarizes your brand and points AI tools to your most important pages.
AI crawlers: Bots such as GPTBot, PerplexityBot and ClaudeBot that read websites for AI products. Blocking them in robots.txt can keep you out of answers.
Agentic commerce: Shopping where an AI assistant researches, compares and sometimes completes purchases on the buyer's behalf.