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Stage 02 · Get Found

AI SEO for stores: get named when a buyer asks ChatGPT

When a buyer asks an AI engine what to buy or who to buy it from, the answer draws on pages it can reach and trust. The work is making your store one of them.

Reachable first

GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google Extended have to be able to fetch the pages that matter. Stores block them at the server or the CDN without knowing. It is binary and it comes first.

A catalog is not an article

Most advice on this is written for software companies. A store's value is in specifics: cut, weight, breed, grade, shipping window. If that detail only lives inside a variant picker, an engine has nothing to quote.

Measure, then build

Ask the engines the questions your buyers ask and write down whether you are named and who is named instead. Being mentioned and being recommended are different events, and most tools blur them into one number.

What will not move it

No guaranteed citation, because nobody controls how an engine cites. No text file and no special markup sold as a shortcut. For brand citation work beyond a store's catalog, my business partner Joseph Timpson runs The Cited Method at josephtimpson.com.

Where this fits

This is the Get Found stage of The Traffic to Sales Method. See it applied to one store, with the numbers, in the case study.

Straight answers

Questions about this.

How do I get my Shopify store cited by ChatGPT and other AI engines?

Make the store reachable to AI crawlers, publish specifics only you can say, and measure whether you are named. There is no file or markup that buys a citation.

Start with a conversation, not a contract.

Thirty minutes. If this is not your gap, I will tell you which one is.