Can ChatGPT recommend your products? What AI shopping assistants need from your store

A growing number of shoppers no longer type a few words into Google and scroll. They ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google's AI answers something like "a waterproof hiking boot under $150 that runs true to size" — and get back a short list of products, with reasons.

That short list is the new front page. If your products aren't on it, the shopper may never see your store at all. The encouraging part is that what these assistants need is mostly the groundwork good stores should have anyway, and you can check it yourself.

How an assistant decides what to recommend

Nobody outside these companies knows the exact rules, and they change. But the broad shape is clear. An assistant can only recommend what it can find and read: pages its crawler is allowed to visit, product facts it can pick out reliably, and information that answers the shopper's actual question. It then prefers sources that look trustworthy and complete.

In other words, it behaves like a very fast, very literal shop assistant who has read your website and nothing else. If your page doesn't say the boot is waterproof, the assistant doesn't know it is.

Five things that decide whether you're in the answer

• Its crawler is allowed in. Each assistant has its own crawler, and a setting in your robots.txt file or your security service can block it without anyone noticing.
• Your product facts are machine-readable. Price, stock, brand and product codes should be in your page's structured data — a hidden block written for machines rather than people.
• The content is there without JavaScript. If your description or price only appears after scripts run, some crawlers see an empty page.
• Descriptions answer real questions. Materials, sizing, fit, compatibility, care, what's in the box — the things shoppers ask, written out in words.
• Your shipping and returns are easy to find. "Which one can I return for free?" is a common question. If your policy is buried in an image or a PDF, the answer isn't yours.

What you can check in ten minutes

• Open yourstore.com/robots.txt and look for lines that disallow crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search) or PerplexityBot.
• Open one of your product pages, view the page source (not the inspector), and search for your price and a sentence from the description. If they aren't there, crawlers that don't run scripts can't see them either.
• Paste a product page into Google's Rich Results Test and check that it finds a Product with a price and availability.
• Read your best-selling product's description as if you were a stranger with one question. Is the answer on the page?

Be wary of anyone promising to get you recommended by ChatGPT. Nobody can guarantee that. What you can do is remove every reason an assistant has to skip you — and those are the same fixes that help your normal search rankings and your customers.

Is this replacing normal SEO?

No. Almost everything here also helps you in ordinary search: clear titles, complete product data, fast pages that work without tricks, and honest, detailed descriptions. Stores that did that groundwork are simply visible in one more place. Stores that skipped it are now invisible in two.