Roughly 22% of shoppers now use AI tools to research products and brands before they buy. That number was near zero three years ago. And the visitors who arrive from an AI recommendation behave differently: industry data puts conversion from ChatGPT referrals at around 7%, versus 5% from Google, with nearly double the time on site.
So the question is no longer whether AI recommendations matter. It is whether the AI is recommending you or someone else. Most brand owners have never checked. Here is how to do it properly, without any tools or subscriptions.
The 15-minute audit
You need three AI assistants and five questions. That is the whole setup.
- Write down five questions a real customer would ask. Not your brand name. The situation that leads to your product. If you sell ceramic dinnerware, a real question is "durable handmade dinnerware that survives a dishwasher," not "tell me about [your brand]." Pull these from customer emails, reviews, and support questions if you are stuck.
- Ask all five questions in three places: ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Mode. Use a private or logged-out window where you can, so your own history does not flatter the results.
- Record four things for each answer. Were you mentioned? Which competitors were mentioned? Is what the AI said about you accurate? And which sources did it cite, if it showed any?
- Ask one direct question at the end: "What do you know about [your brand]?" This shows you what the AI believes about you, which is not always what your website says.
How to read your results
| What you found | What it means | First move |
|---|---|---|
| You are recommended | The AI can see you and trusts you | Protect it. Keep sources fresh and accurate |
| Mentioned, not recommended | Visible but not convincing | Strengthen reviews and third-party mentions |
| Wrong information | The AI learned from stale or thin sources | Fix the pages it cited, update key info everywhere |
| Absent entirely | The AI cannot see you or cannot understand you | Start with product data and a presence beyond your own site |
You can rank on Google and still be invisible here
This is the finding that surprises owners most. Research from the GEO field suggests the overlap between top Google results and the sources AI engines cite has fallen from around 70% to below 20%. Most pages that AI assistants cite do not sit in Google's top ten at all.
The two systems reward different things. Google rewards pages built to rank. AI assistants pull from sources they consider trustworthy and current: review platforms, comparison articles, forums, product data, and pages that answer questions directly. Years of classic SEO work do not automatically transfer. That is uncomfortable, but it also means the field is more open than it looks.
What to do with what you find
The instinct is to rewrite your homepage. That is usually the wrong first move, because the AI mostly formed its opinion elsewhere. Work on what the AI reads:
- Reviews, first and always. AI assistants lean heavily on review volume and content. A steady flow of detailed reviews does more for AI visibility than any single page on your site.
- Third-party mentions. Comparison posts, gift guides, niche blogs, and forums are exactly the sources AI answers cite. One good mention in a "best of" article can outweigh ten pages of your own copy.
- Your product data. Descriptive titles, full descriptions, real image alt text. The AI cannot recommend what it cannot understand. We covered this in detail in our piece on Shopify's Agentic channel.
- Recency. AI engines weigh freshness. A page last touched in 2024 loses to a 2026 page saying the same thing. Update your key pages and put a date on them.
Frequently asked questions
How often should I run this check?
Monthly is enough for most stores. AI answers shift as models and sources update, so a single check is a snapshot, not a verdict. Keep the same five questions so you can compare over time.
Do I need paid GEO tools for this?
Not to start. The manual check above gives you the baseline for free. Paid tracking tools become useful once you are actively working on visibility and want to measure progress across many questions.
The AI said something wrong about my brand. Can I correct it?
Not directly, but you can fix the sources. Ask the AI where its information came from, correct those pages, and make sure your key facts are consistent on your site, your profiles, and review platforms. Corrections take time to flow through.
My brand didn't show up anywhere. Is it too late?
No, and the timing is actually good. Most brands are not tracking AI visibility at all yet, so the gap between doing nothing and doing the basics is still large. Absent today mostly means the work has not started.
The short version
People ask AI what to buy, and the AI answers with a short list. Fifteen minutes of asking the right questions tells you whether you are on that list, and the answer sets your priorities: protect it, strengthen it, correct it, or build it. Do the check before you spend another euro on marketing, because it changes what the next euro should go toward.
If you would rather have us run the full version, with more questions, more platforms, and a plan attached, that is a good reason to start a conversation.