Why do competitors keep showing up in ChatGPT for my product category while my store is invisible?

@Rahul-FoundGPT
Sat, 25 Apr 2026 09:06:58 +0000

@Arbazkakkar2 that real data point is valuable, thank you for sharing it. 50 orders with zero ad spend and every third order from ChatGPT on a store with 241 monthly visitors is a conversion rate most paid channels cannot match.

The chatgpt.com/merchants setup you mentioned is worth doing for US stores. For stores outside the US, or in addition to it, there is a second layer worth noting: the reason ChatGPT cited that blog post is that it answered a specific operational question in plain language. That is the citation pattern we keep seeing. Not product pages. Not metadata. Problem-focused content written in a real voice.

@lawrencedauchy the split to keep in mind is roughly 60/40. Around 60% of AI visibility comes from external citations, which is the blog, Reddit, and gift guide layer everyone in this thread has covered well. The remaining 40% is internal store health: whether the store product data is structured well enough for the model to actually retrieve accurate details once it has decided to recommend you. That second part is what most merchants ignore because normal SEO tools do not measure it. Checking that yourstore.com/llms.txt exists and that your schema is returning clean product data is the fastest place to start on that side.