Research notes on AI citations and Shopify GEO.
Agentic Storefronts syndicates the catalogue you own into AI shopping surfaces. But 85% of AI brand mentions form on pages you don't own, and no catalogue feed reaches those. What the new tools get you, what they can't touch, and what decides which product an assistant names.
Across 75,000 brands, YouTube mentions correlate with AI visibility at 0.737, ahead of every other factor Ahrefs measured. Where the effect is real (Gemini, AI Overviews, Grok), where it rounds to zero (ChatGPT, Claude), and what to film.
None of the major AI crawlers render JavaScript, 44.2% of ChatGPT citations come from a page's first 30%, and schema didn't move citations across 1,885 tracked pages. The five-step product page rebuild, with the evidence behind each step.
Across our 40-store cohort, 67% of the sources Gemini cites on product queries are ranked lists. Product pages take 6%. What the three assistants cite, with data from 400 million citations, and what to publish instead.
AirOps classified 21,311 brand mentions across ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity: 85% came from third-party pages, nine in ten of them listicles, comparisons or reviews. Where the mentions live, and the September shift that repriced them.
ChatGPT generates a quarter of its answers without fetching a single web page. Gemini cites no source in 92% of replies. So what actually decides whether your store gets recommended? Five levers, with a four-week sequence to move them.