What should you fix when AI assistants name competitors instead of your store?
A shopper asks an assistant where to buy something you sell.
The answer names three other stores. Yours is not there.
That is frustrating, but it is not yet a diagnosis.
Your store may be missing details the question needs. A product may not meet Shopify Catalog requirements. Your delivery information may be unclear. Or an assistant may simply answer from sources that do not include your store.
Do not treat every missing mention as a reason to rewrite everything.
Start with the question and the answer you received.
First, look at the exact question
A brand search and a shopping question tell you different things.
“Is Acme Outdoors a good brand?” checks whether an assistant knows your name.
“Where can I buy waterproof hiking trousers for winter walking?” checks whether it can connect your products to a shopper need.
The second question is usually more useful when you are deciding what to fix.
Say your store sells linen shirts. These questions point to different product details:
- “Where can I buy a relaxed-fit linen shirt?”
- “Which stores sell linen shirts that ship to Canada?”
- “Are there linen shirts suitable for hot weather?”
- “Which linen shirts have easy care instructions?”
A store can answer one of these well and miss another.
Descriva asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini shopper questions about your products. It shows the result question by question:
- Whether the assistant named your store
- Whether it left your store out
- Which brands it named instead
- The sources it cited
AI Mentions are counts, not a visibility score. You might find that ChatGPT named your store in 3 of 9 answers, while another assistant named it in none.
That difference matters. Do not assume one assistant's answer represents all of them.
Read the cited sources before changing your store
When a competitor is named, look at the sources the assistant cited.
You are trying to answer a plain question: what information did the competitor make easy to find?
It may be a product page with clear measurements. It may be a collection page built around a use case. It may be a shipping page that answers where the store delivers. It may be information from Shopify Catalog.
Do not copy a competitor's wording. Find the missing fact in your own store.
For example, a shopper asks about climbing shoes for wide feet. A competitor may be named because its page says which fit it suits, how the shoe performs, and whether it can be resoled.
If your page only says “high-performance climbing shoe,” the problem is not that it lacks more marketing language. It lacks useful details.
Shopify recommends detailed product information, including specifications, comparison information, sizing, materials, care instructions, clear titles, prices, availability, and descriptive image alt text. Those details help shoppers too. Shopify's guidance is worth using as a page-level checklist.
Fix the page when the answer belongs on the page
A product page should answer the questions that would stop someone buying.
For a shirt, that could include:
- Fit and measurements
- Fabric composition
- Care instructions
- Colour and size options
- Whether it is in stock
For a refillable cleaning product, it could include:
- What is included
- What it works with
- How many uses it provides
- The ingredients or materials
- Whether refills are sold separately
In Descriva, the Optimize tab puts a product's description, search listing, title, image alt text, FAQ, and specs pack in one place.
You can write changes yourself or draft them with AI. They wait for your review. Nothing publishes until you press Publish, and History keeps what the changed field replaced.
That last part is important. An assistant can draft a useful first pass, but it does not know whether your supplier changed a material, a fit, or a shipping restriction. Check every claim against the product you sell.
Fix agent information when the question is about the store
Some questions are not really product-page questions.
“Do they ship to Canada?” is about where you ship.
“What does delivery cost?” is about shipping terms.
“Can I return this?” is about returns.
Descriva shows, word for word, what your store's own agent tool tells shoppers' AI agents about returns, shipping cost, delivery time, shipping countries, and contact details.
If an answer is missing, it links to Shopify's Knowledge Base app, where you can add the FAQ yourself. When you return, Descriva asks again.
Shopify says Knowledge Base FAQs can cover areas such as delivery, returns, store policies, shipping countries, and brand differences. Keep each answer short and specific. A one- or two-sentence answer is often enough.
For example:
We ship to Canada. Delivery times and costs are shown at checkout based on your address.
Only publish that if it is true for your store.
Knowledge Base can improve the accuracy of answers agents give. It does not control how often your store appears in AI results. That is why it is useful to fix a missing policy answer, but unwise to expect it to solve every missing mention by itself.
Check whether the product is eligible for an agent
Sometimes the page is clear, but the product is not ready to be surfaced.
Shopify Catalog exposes product information to participating AI channels for eligible products. That can include titles, descriptions, images, prices, options, availability, categories, variants, and inventory. Inclusion does not guarantee that a product will appear in an answer or determine what an assistant says about it.
Descriva's Agent view shows what Shopify Catalog provides for each product. It also flags common problems:
- The product is draft or unlisted
- It has no image
- Its price is 0
- It is not published to the Online Store
- It is hidden from search engines
- Your store is behind a password page
It can also suggest a missing product category. You approve it before anything changes.
This takes less than a minute to check for one product. Open the product in Shopify and confirm that it is active, published to Online Store, priced, and has an image. Then check it in Descriva's Agent view.
Do this before spending time on a rewrite.
Do not confuse files with product readiness
Your store's AI files matter, but they do not replace complete product data.
Shopify currently uses `/agents.md` as its canonical agent-discovery URL. It also serves `/llms.txt` and `/llms-full.txt` for compatibility. Shopify says these files are separate from Shopify Catalog.
Descriva serves `llms.txt`, `llms-full.txt`, and a markdown page for every product and collection on your own domain. They update within 10 minutes of a product change.
Shopify already serves a default `/llms.txt`, so that basic file counts as done. Descriva can provide a theme template that lists your products too, then check the live file after you paste it.
We chose that route deliberately. Descriva does not ask for theme-write permission. The trade is simple: you paste a theme-level template yourself, and Descriva checks the live URL instead of assuming the paste worked.
Crawler rules are another separate check. Blocking a crawler in `robots.txt` can affect open-web crawling. Shopify says that does not stop eligible product data being sent through Shopify Catalog to activated agentic storefront channels.
In other words, do not use one signal to explain everything. A crawler visit is not a mention. A good AI file is not a guarantee. Catalog inclusion is not a guarantee either.
Use readiness and mentions for different jobs
Descriva has one score: AI readiness, out of 100.
It reads your store directly, with no AI call. It checks five areas:
- Product data
- AI shopping agents
- Live pages
- Trust and policies
- Crawler access
Each gap has a fix, with the biggest win first.
Use AI readiness to find basic store problems.
Use AI Mentions to see what assistants said when faced with real shopper questions.
A store can be technically ready and still not be named for a particular question. That usually means you need to inspect the question, the cited sources, and the relevant product or policy information.
Start with one product
Every store gets one AI visibility check when it installs Descriva, before choosing a plan.
Pick a product you know well. A bestseller is a sensible choice.
Descriva asks three shopper questions about that product across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. You can see how many answers named your store, who was named instead, and the cited sources.
Then make one fix that you can verify: add a missing material detail, publish an accurate shipping FAQ, correct a product's availability, or confirm its Catalog requirements.
Check the facts first. Change the smallest thing that answers the shopper's question.