AI rankings shows whether AI assistants recommend your products for the questions shoppers actually ask. Each question is run as a live search of Shopify’s AI catalog in the country you choose, and asked of ChatGPT and Gemini, so you see your rank, the product that comes first and what each assistant answered.
What is the Shopify catalog, and why does it matter?
Shopify maintains a global product catalog that AI agents query through its agentic commerce tools. When an assistant looks for products to recommend, this catalog is what it searches, and its copy of your product is what it quotes. Octolift asks the catalog the way an agent does.
On a product’s analysis page, How you appear in the Shopify catalog shows the summary the catalog has built from your listing:
- Unique selling points: what makes the product worth recommending.
- Top features: the features an assistant would list.
- Tech specs: the specifications it can compare. A spec it could not find reads Not specified.
- Attributes: the structured values it extracted.
A Not specified is a gap worth filling in your description or category fields.
How are questions checked?
On the AI rankings page, type a question a shopper might ask and press Check, or press Generate questions and pick a product: Octolift writes the questions a shopper is likely to ask, from its title, product type and category, in the main language of the country being checked.
Each question is then checked three ways:
| Source | How it is asked | What you see |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify catalog | A live search for a shopper in that country; the top ten results are read. | Your rank in the top 10, or Not in top 10, and the listing in first place. |
| ChatGPT | Asked with web search on, for a shopper in that country. | Whether it recommended your product, and its top pick. |
| Gemini | Asked with Google Search grounding, for a shopper in that country. | Whether it recommended your product, and its top pick. |
Show answers opens each assistant’s full answer.
What do the verdicts mean?
- Recommended #N: the assistant recommended your product, in that position.
- Mentioned you, recommended others: it named your store but picked someone else.
- Recommended none of your products: you were not in the answer.
Across all your questions, Competing brands lists the brands recommended instead, with how many of your questions each one appeared in. Since the last check shows the rank moves since the previous check.
Why is there no fixed rank inside ChatGPT or Gemini?
Assistant answers change between runs and vary by country, so a single number would look precise while meaning nothing. Octolift shows what they recommended and in what order. The rank it reports as a number is the one in the Shopify catalog, which is repeatable and yours to improve.
Ranking mixes many signals: listing completeness, popularity, buyer engagement and brand recognition. Completeness is the part you control directly, through the score breakdown and Improve with AI.
How does the shopper country work?
The catalog answers per buyer country and shipping destination, and shoppers phrase things differently per market, so a rank is always for one country. Octolift starts with your home market. If you ship to more than one country, pick a market in the Country dropdown; generated questions are then written in that market’s main language, and questions asked in one country are kept separate from another.
How does your list of questions work?
Every question you ask stays in your list for its country, with its catalog rank and the assistants’ answers. The list is for the whole store, not for one product.
- Each question you ask uses one of the questions your plan includes. Asking one that is already in your list uses nothing.
- On a paid plan, press Check on a row to ask it again, once a week at most, or turn on Check weekly to have every question checked once a week for you.
- On the Free plan, each question is checked once.
- Removing a question frees its place when your plan renews.
What is not measured?
Octolift does not crawl your product pages or your theme, read structured data from them, or measure page speed. Every check reads your product through Shopify and the catalog.