Analyzing Product Visibility in AI Shopping Mode
Key Concepts
Shopping Mode Rate: The percentage of your tracked prompts where ChatGPT triggers a shopping experience (product tiles, images, prices, merchant links) instead of a standard text answer. A low rate means the shopping surface may be a secondary priority for your topics; a high rate means this data is critical.
Merchant Layer: A layer unique to AI shopping that doesn't exist in standard answer engine results. Your product can appear in a shopping response, but the checkout destination may route to a third-party retailer rather than your own store. Visibility alone doesn't guarantee the sale flows to you.
Brand Share by Merchant: The percentage of a given merchant's recommended products that belong to your brand. Even if a merchant dominates checkout options, they serve a mix of brands, so your product competes with others at the point of purchase.
Product Layer: The specific individual products that get the shopping tile (image, price, buy button). These may not be your products at all, even within your own product categories.
Quick Reference
Shopping Tab: What to Check First
- Visibility Score - Is your brand showing up in shopping-triggered responses? How does it rank against competitors?
- Shopping Mode Rate - How often do your prompts actually trigger shopping vs. text answers? If this is low, shopping is a secondary surface for your categories.
- Top Visible Brands by Topic - Visibility can swing dramatically by topic for the same brand. Identify where you dominate and where the gaps are.
Merchants Tab: Follow the Checkout
- Merchant share rankings - Which retailers own the most checkout options? Your own store may rank well below third-party retailers.
- Brand share by merchant - For each top merchant, what percentage of their recommended products are yours? A dominant merchant with low brand share means your product competes at checkout.
Products Tab: What Actually Gets the Tile
- Review which individual products appear most in shopping mode. The top products may not be yours, even in your own categories.
- Click into a product for specific analytics.
- Drill into Prompts to see prompt-level performance within a topic. Aggregate topic visibility can hide wide variation at the prompt level.
Two Layers That Only Exist in Shopping
- Merchant layer - You're visible, but does checkout flow to you or a retailer? If direct-to-consumer revenue matters, this is where to look.
- Product layer - It's not just "is my brand mentioned" but "which specific products got the tile?" Competitors or unrelated accessories may be winning the product slots in your categories.
Levers (Covered Further in the Generate Section)
- Merchant relationships
- Product feed optimization
- Structured product data so ChatGPT can pull it into tiles correctly
