By Steve Merrill, Founder of WRKNG Digital | September 23, 2026
You don't need a tool to find out how AI sees your store. You need seven questions and fifteen minutes. Ask each of ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI, and write down what comes back.
Where the assistant hedges or names a competitor, you've found a data problem worth fixing.
1. "Recommend the best [your category] for [use case]."
The baseline. Do you get named at all? Who does instead? This is your starting mention rate.
2. "Is [your product] in stock and what does it cost?"
If the assistant can't answer, your price and availability aren't machine-readable. That's the highest-priority fix there is.
3. "What are the specs of [your product]?"
If it hedges or gets details wrong, your specs are probably trapped in images instead of written as text.
4. "Compare [your product] to [competitor product]."
Watch which facts it can cite for each. Gaps on your side are fields you left blank that your competitor filled.
5. "What do reviews say about [your product]?"
If it can't summarize your reviews, they probably aren't marked up. Visible stars aren't a signal a machine can read.
6. "Which [category] store ships fastest to [location]?"
If you're absent, your shipping data isn't feeding the assistant. Time-bound requests are a growing share of shopping queries.
7. "Where can I buy [your product]?"
If the assistant sends people to a marketplace instead of your store, your own pages aren't giving it enough to cite you directly.
Further reading
Frequently Asked Questions
How can I test how AI sees my store?
Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI seven questions about your category and products, recommendations, price and stock, specs, a competitor comparison, reviews, shipping, and where to buy. Where an assistant hedges, gets facts wrong, or names a competitor, you've found a data gap to fix. It takes about fifteen minutes and no special tools.
What does it mean if AI can't state my product's price?
It usually means your price and availability aren't machine-readable, often because they load by JavaScript after the page or aren't in your feed. Since availability and price are the first things an assistant checks, that's the highest-priority fix to make.
Why does the assistant send shoppers to a marketplace instead of my store?
Because the marketplace gave it more machine-readable facts to cite than your own pages did. Strengthen your product data, structured schema, readable specs, current availability, so the assistant has enough to recommend your store directly.
Want to know if AI assistants can actually find and recommend your store? Get a free AI-visibility read on your Shopify store at WRKNG Digital. We show you exactly what ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI see when they look at your products.
