Two weeks ago I asked four AI engines about my own brand 168 times. They mentioned me zero times. That experiment killed my first product — an AI brand-monitoring SaaS nobody would pay for.
Here's what I learned instead, and what I built this week:
1. The recommendation slot is earned, not bought.
OpenAI opened self-serve ChatGPT ads in May 2026. But ads sit next to the answer, clearly labeled, and per OpenAI they don't influence what the answer says. When a client asks "can I pay to be recommended by ChatGPT?" the honest answer is no. Organic AI visibility is a separate discipline.
2. The money already flows through AI answers.
~50M shopping questions hit ChatGPT every day. Shopify's AI-referred orders are up 13x year-over-year. AI-referred traffic converts 42–54% better. A Scandinavian activewear store just got a real order from a customer who found them through a Perplexity citation. Sellers are already spending $349–$2,849/month on tools like Azoma to be visible here — or paying agencies even more.
3. So I built the test I wish existed: Quotalis AI Shopping Visibility Check.
- Free: paste your product URL, we ask a real buying question to 2 AI engines, and show you whether your product gets recommended — and who gets picked instead. No login.
- $29 one-time: the full report — 2 buying questions × 4 engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity), competitor gap table, cited-source breakdown, and a prioritized fix checklist.
Honest by design: we query model APIs through a disclosed gateway and label every number as a directional signal. No fake scores, no "guaranteed #1" nonsense. If the engines don't mention you, the report says so — that's the point.
Free check: https://quotalis.app/free-check
I'm an indie hacker, not an agency. If you're a Shopify/DTC seller, try the free check and tell me what it got wrong — that's how the product gets better.
Top comments (1)
The "earned, not bought" angle is a sharp way to frame it, and asking readers to tell you what it got wrong is the right instinct for a launch post.
I test live sites a lot (Staff SDET by day), so I ran a quick structured pass on Quotalis instead of just clicking around. The thing that jumped out: the home page, /free-check and /pricing go out without og:title or og:description. When someone pastes the link into Slack, X or a Shopify group, the preview card has to guess what the page is about. For a product built around how machines read and summarize a brand, that one feels worth tightening.
Overall it landed at 97/100 (A), so the basics are solid. We found 5 other issues in the same pass, nothing dramatic.
How are you choosing which assistants the test actually queries?