How do we optimize our Shopify stores for LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.)?

@Rahul-FoundGPT
Sat, 25 Apr 2026 09:46:40 +0000

@Geoffy the breakdown you shared is the most practical summary in this thread and the 46% Reddit citation stat is the one that should reset how merchants think about this.

It maps directly to the two-lever framework I keep coming back to when auditing stores: roughly 60% of AI visibility comes from external citations (Reddit, blogs, gift guides, review roundups) and 40% from internal store health (schema, product data completeness, llms.txt). Most merchants spend all their time on the internal 40% because it feels controllable, while the external 60% sits untouched because nobody tells them which pages to target.

The practical move on the citation side: run the ChatGPT query for your top 3 product categories and click through to the sources it cites. Those URLs are your outreach list. Getting a single mention on a page that ChatGPT already trusts is worth more than a month of description rewrites. For most Shopify merchants in niche categories, 3 to 5 strong external mentions are enough to start appearing in AI responses.

Your robots.txt point from earlier in the thread is the baseline check that should happen first. No amount of external citations help if the model cannot crawl your store to verify the product exists and confirm price, availability, and attributes. Both layers have to work for the flywheel to start.