Short answer: Our free AI-readiness report now checks a fourth assistant — Perplexity — alongside Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini. Perplexity is the one shoppers reach for in research mode, when they're close to a purchase and tend to trust the cited answer they get back. Because every assistant sees your store differently, checking one tells you almost nothing about the others.
Our free AI-readiness report just gained a fourth column. Alongside Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, every report now asks Perplexity what it tells shoppers about your store — live, with real web search, the way its actual users experience it.
Why check Perplexity, and why now?
Perplexity earns its own column because it reaches shoppers at the moment they're deciding what to buy. Each assistant we check has a different audience:
- ChatGPT is the biggest crowd.
- Gemini is woven into Android and Google.
- Claude skews toward professionals thinking through considered purchases.
- Perplexity is something else again: the one people reach for when they're in research mode — comparing options, checking claims, deciding where to put their money. It answers with citations, like a search engine that reads everything for you.
That makes it disproportionately important for stores. A shopper who asks Perplexity "best ceramic-coated frying pan that isn't Teflon?" isn't idly chatting — they're close to a purchase, and they tend to trust the cited answer they get back.
What did we see on day one?
On day one, one result stopped us: Perplexity actively steered a shopper away from a store — not because the product was bad, but because the site's public footprint was too thin for the AI to verify it exists.
We ran the new column against stores we'd already assessed. For a young supplement brand, Perplexity didn't just fail to find the store — it told the shopper, in so many words:
"I could not reliably identify a business at this domain… I'd avoid buying a supplement from a site I can't verify."
Read that again from the merchant's side: an AI with millions of research-minded users is actively steering shoppers away. Meanwhile the same store was findable by ChatGPT and Gemini. Every assistant sees you differently; checking one tells you almost nothing about the others.
The fixes, as usual, are unglamorous and mostly free: machine-readable product data, real policy pages, a consistent name across the pages assistants read. What's new is being able to see which assistant needs them.
How do I check where my store stands?
Run the free snapshot — it takes about two minutes and now covers all four assistants: what each one says about your store, what it gets wrong, and who it recommends instead: assessment.sqrly.ai/check.
sqrly gives online stores a digital twin that answers every shopper and AI agent from the live catalog, live on Shopify today with more commerce platforms coming soon. See how it works or become a pilot shop.