Our products do not appear in AI shopping answers

A missing product can have several causes. The questions may be poor, the item may be unavailable, important facts may be absent, another page may be easier to cite, or the system may simply choose a competitor.

Typical symptoms

• Competitors appear for category and comparison questions.
• The brand appears only when its name is included.
• Answers cite publishers or marketplaces instead of the merchant.
• Product details are stale, incomplete, or wrong.

What to capture

Record the question set, model or answer system, market, date and time, full answer, cited URLs, merchant attribution, and competing products.

Then check the product page, structured data, availability, canonical URL, indexability, merchant identity, and catalog values.

Don't assume

Missing schema is not automatically the cause. Rewriting copy before checking the cited sources can waste time or introduce unsupported claims.

Steps

1. Check that the questions reflect real buying intent.
2. Group them into branded, category, comparison, and use-case questions.
3. Note which pages are cited when your product is absent.
4. Compare merchant-owned facts with the facts on those cited pages.
5. Pick one merchant-controlled page or data source that can be improved accurately.
6. Run the same question set again and record the difference.

Done when

• Baseline and retest conditions match.
• Product facts agree across the page, catalog, and markup.
• Answer changes are reported as retest observations.
• No claim is made about guaranteed placement or sales.