Short answer: AI assistants recommend the products they can most confidently understand — ones with structured, machine-readable data, complete and specific attributes, clear trust signals, and pages that answer the buyer's real question. They skip products whose key facts are buried in prose or images, or that they can't crawl at all. Every one of those is fixable.
Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude for "the best [something] under $X" and you'll get specific recommendations — named products, sometimes named stores. Ask about your category, and if your products aren't in the answer, the reason is knowable. Here's how the choice gets made, and how to be the one it picks.
How does AI decide which products to recommend?
AI assistants don't recommend based on your ad budget or a clever SEO trick — they recommend what they can confidently understand. Four things drive it:
Structured, machine-readable data. Agents read product feeds and structured markup — not your hero image or your tagline. If a product's key facts (specs, price, availability, attributes) are cleanly structured, an agent can use them. Buried in prose or baked into an image, they often can't.
Completeness and specificity. To recommend a product for a person, the agent has to know who it's for. "Lightweight all-mountain ski, intermediate, 165–175cm" is recommendable. "Great ski, ride in style" is not. A gap in your data is a gap in your visibility.
Trust signals. Agents check that you're a real, safe place to buy — clear shipping and return policies, reviews, pages that work. They're cautious about sending someone to a store they can't vouch for.
Answering the real question. Buyers ask "which one is right for me?" Pages that actually answer that — comparisons, fit guidance, use-case framing — get surfaced. Keyword-stuffed pages don't.
At a glance:
- ✅ Recommended when: specs, price, and attributes are in structured data; listings say who the product is for; shipping, returns, and policy pages are clear; pages answer "which is right for me?"
- ❌ Skipped when: key facts live only in prose or images; copy is vague ("premium quality," "ride in style"); trust signals are missing or broken; pages just repeat keywords.
The simplest rule of all: you can't be recommended for something the AI can't tell you sell. Absence of data is absence from the answer.
First, can the AI even read your store?
Before any of that: many stores accidentally block AI from reading them at all. Two quick checks:
- Is your content in the page's HTML — or only loaded by JavaScript that a crawler may never run?
- Does your robots file welcome the AI crawlers — the ones from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and others — rather than block them?
If an agent can't read your pages, nothing else on this list matters.
How do I get my store recommended by AI?
Five moves, in order of impact:
- Make product data complete and specific. Add fit, sizing, who-it's-for, and what-it-pairs-with — to your best sellers first.
- Add structured data. Product schema (JSON-LD) lets machines parse your catalog reliably. Most platforms support it; Shopify largely handles it when your fields are actually filled in.
- Make sure you're crawlable. Server-rendered content, a sitemap, and a robots file that allows AI crawlers.
- Fill policies and FAQs so an agent can confidently vouch for you.
- Write for the question. Replace "premium quality" with the specifics a buyer actually weighs.
How can I test the way AI sees my store today?
Ask the three big assistants yourself: "What do you know about [your store]?" and "Recommend a [your category] for [a specific kind of buyer]." For a lot of small shops the honest answer is that you simply don't come up — which is exactly the gap worth closing. (If you'd rather not dig through three chat windows, we'll send you a read on how each one currently sees your store.)
The deepest version of this — an agent that carries your full category expertise and walks each shopper to the right pick — is what sqrly is built to give every store. But the steps above are free, and they're the foundation either way.
The bottom line
Being recommended by AI isn't luck or budget — it's legibility: making what you sell, and who it's for, something a machine can understand and trust. The stores that do that are the ones showing up in the answer.
sqrly helps online retailers become the store AI recommends — by giving every shopper and every agent a knowledgeable, on-brand conversation. Join the waitlist.