Hi Everyone,
Something I keep noticing is that shoppers are using ChatGPT and Perplexity to find products, but most merchants I talk to have not changed anything about their store for it yet.
I am curious if anyone here is:
Genuinely curious where people are at with this.
Many thanks,
Kit
Hi @Devkit, good question and the honest answer is that most merchants are still in the “confused about what to do first” bucket, which is actually an opportunity for the ones who move now.
To your three buckets:
Still focused on Google SEO only: the majority. The common reasoning is “AI traffic is too small to matter yet.” That is true in absolute volume but misses the direction of change. AI-attributed sessions are growing month over month and the conversion rate on those sessions tends to be higher because the buyer has already been guided before arriving. The window to build early visibility is now, not once the channel is crowded.
Already using tools: a smaller group, and mostly doing one of two things. Either tracking which queries they appear in (using tools like Profound or manually prompting ChatGPT), or adding llms.txt to their stores. The llms.txt approach is the right first move because it gives AI crawlers a clear, structured brief about your store without requiring any technical work on product pages. Most Shopify stores do not have one yet. FoundGPT (full disclosure, that is the app we build) generates and hosts it for free along with an audit of your store’s AI readiness.
Confused about what to do first: the most common state. The practical starting order is: first check if AI tools can even find your store by typing your brand name into ChatGPT and seeing what it returns. If it returns nothing or returns wrong information, you have an entity recognition problem. Second, check if your product schema is returning clean JSON-LD with name, description, price, availability, and brand populated. Third, add an llms.txt file at yourstore.com/llms.txt.
Those three steps cover most of the on-store gap that causes stores to be invisible to AI recommendation even when they rank fine on Google.
I mostly focus on off-site activities. Getting detailed reviews, asking for shout-outs from influencers, building a backlink+mention infrastructure.
For on-site adjustments, I got a couple of free tools just to hunt for some prompt recommendations: these are Beamtrace and MentionNetwork. I chose them mostly for having a free plan, as my customer wasn’t ready for extra costs.
Another easy thing for you to start is to creat relevant social media pages and describe your brand with the rgiht context (one that you want to be discovered with).
Hi Mark,
Thank you for sharing this, its very useful. The off-site approach makes a lot of sense especially building and reviews that AI tools actually pull from.
I am new to Beamtrace and MentionNetwork and i’ll definitely check them out.
Also i’m hearing this a lot that merchants are not ready for extra costs regarding AI search visibility.
Thank you again,
Kit
Hello there Kit @Devkit
The same pattern is emerging. The basics are still good SEO: clear product titles, comprehensive descriptions, structured data, robust collection pages, and well-formatted metadata. AI search products typically draw from well-structured authoritative content, thus enhancing content quality is most often the first step. We’ve also had great success by adding FAQs, buying guides and comparison content that answers questions the customers have. For now, I would focus on just making your store content more easily digestible than trying to find apps ‘for AI’.
I think most merchants are still treating it as an extention of SEO, a part that’s worth trying rather than a completely separated channel to focus on. AI tools like GPT and Perplexity tend to favor content that clearly answers specifics questions, comparisions, use cases. A lot of Shopify stores has products or services that can well adress problems for customers but they’re not strutured in a way that’s AI systems can understand and cite.
If I need to start doing this part, I will also treat it as an extention apart from traditional SEO because if we take a closer look, we can see pages appearing on AI responses have strong SEO foundation already. We can start by making product and collection pages more descriptive and intent-focus. Add FAQs, comparition content or content that directly answers the questions.
Some Shopify tools, are now combining AI into their functions to better suit the trend. For example, use AI Keyword research to see which kind of keywords will serve the best for AI searches and response, AI Blog to generate content that both comply with SEO standards for search engines and also AI searches
Hi @Devkit,
You are totally right. Most merchants are still stuck on traditional Google SEO and feel completely lost when it comes to AI search like ChatGPT and Perplexity. It is a huge shift, and people are definitely confused about where to even start.
The biggest thing to understand is that AI bots rely heavily on perfectly structured data to know what you sell. If your site code is messy, the AI simply skips your store. For anyone wondering what to do first, fixing your technical schema is step one. To make this easy, I highly recommend using SearchPie: SEO, Speed & Schema. It can automatically build advanced JSON-LD schema for your products, making it incredibly easy for AI agents to read, verify, and recommend your items.
Hope this helps!
Hello, @Devkit
Hope you are doing well!
We’re definitely paying more attention to it now. Traditional SEO is still important, but we’re also focusing on clear product description, structured data, FAQs and helpful content since AI tools seem to rely heavily on well organized information.