I asked ChatGPT about my own store. It named 3 competitors.
A founder’s story many brands will recognise: missing from the shortlist, and described wrongly when AI did find them. What causes it, and the loop that fixes it.
Picture a founder of an outdoor clothing brand. Good products, loyal customers, steady sales. One evening they open ChatGPT and ask what a shopper would ask. This story is an illustration, but every step in it is something AI really does to brands today.
It named three competitors. Not us.
The answer was confident and helpful. It listed three jackets, with reasons. None of them were the founder’s, even though their jacket fit the question exactly.
Shoppers now ask AI first. Shopify’s 2026 holiday report says 65% of shoppers will use AI for at least one shopping task this season. The shortlist AI hands back is short. If you are not one of the three names, you are not in the running.
AI was selling an old version of us
So the founder asked about their own jacket by name. AI knew it, but it knew an old version: sizes from last year, a shipping time from before they switched warehouses, and no reviews at all.
None of it was true anymore. AI just did not know.
Why AI got it wrong
AI mostly repeats what it can read. When the facts on your pages are hard for a machine to find, or disagree with each other, it falls back on whatever it found last.
- Sizes and stock lived in a page script, not in data AI reads.
- The shipping change was on one help page, never on the product page.
- Reviews loaded in a widget, so the rating was not in the page’s structured data.
The fix loop
One fix is not enough, because AI answers drift. What works is a loop that keeps running.
How to tell it worked
Ask the same questions again, the same way, a week later. Two things to track: how often you are named, and whether what AI says about you is true. Both should move. If they do not, the fix went to the wrong place.
See if AI picks you
Shopthru.ai is a team of AI agents for consumer brands on any platform. It runs this loop on ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI, Perplexity and Copilot today, with Instagram and Amazon next. Nothing changes until you say yes.