How to Get Your Store Found by AI Shopping Assistants This Holiday Season
More of your customers are starting their holiday shopping by asking ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google’s AI Mode what to buy. This guide walks through how those tools find products, & the practical steps that make your store easy for them to read & recommend.
Why this matters this holiday season
AI shopping assistants are still a small slice of total traffic, but they’re growing fast. Adobe expects traffic from AI chat & browser tools to U.S. retail sites to grow 130% year over year this holiday season, & 141% on Thanksgiving. Shoppers who use them also tend to stick with what they buy: 69% of shoppers who used an AI assistant told Adobe they’re less likely to return the item (Adobe 2026 Holiday Forecast).
Keep it in perspective. Etsy said on its Q2 2026 earnings call that traffic from AI assistants is still under 1% of its visits. The good news: almost everything that helps AI tools understand your store also helps Google, marketplace search & your human customers. None of this is wasted work.
How AI assistants find products
When someone asks “what’s a good gift for a cat lover under $30?”, an AI assistant pulls from a few places:
- Your website, read by the assistant’s own crawler (for example, OpenAI’s OAI-SearchBot) or by a search index it relies on.
- Product feeds, like the feed you send to Google Merchant Center, or a feed shared directly with ChatGPT.
- Marketplaces & platforms that have their own AI integrations, like Etsy’s app inside ChatGPT or Shopify’s product catalog.
In every case, the assistant is looking for clear facts: what the product is, what it costs, whether it’s in stock, how fast it ships & whether people like it. The steps below make sure those facts are easy to find.
Step 1: Let the right bots in
If an AI assistant can’t read your site, it can’t recommend it. Check two places:
Your robots.txt file. AI companies use separate crawlers for different jobs. OpenAI, for example, uses OAI-SearchBot to show sites in ChatGPT search & GPTBot to collect training data, & each can be allowed or blocked on its own (OpenAI crawler docs). That means you can stay visible in ChatGPT search while opting out of training. A simple setup looks like this:
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /
# Optional: opt out of AI training without affecting ChatGPT search
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /Google’s AI Overviews & AI Mode are part of Google Search, so if Google can crawl your store today, you’re already covered there.
Your CDN or firewall settings. Services like Cloudflare can block AI bots before robots.txt ever comes into play, & Cloudflare has changed its defaults more than once. Since September 15, 2026, new Cloudflare sites, & free accounts that haven’t changed their settings, block AI “training” & “agent” crawlers by default on pages with ads, while search crawlers stay allowed. If you use a CDN, open its bot settings & confirm you aren’t blocking the assistants you want to show up in.
Step 2: Write product pages that answer questions
People talk to AI assistants in full sentences: “soft unisex holiday sweatshirt for my sister, size large, arrives before Christmas.” Assistants match those requests to the facts on your page, so keyword-stuffed titles help less than clear, complete information.
Titles: say what the product is, plainly.
- Before: Funny Cat Mom Shirt Gift Tee Women Men Unisex Cute Kitty Lover Top
- After: Cat Mom Unisex T-Shirt – Soft Cotton, Sizes S–3XL
Descriptions: lead with a one-sentence summary, then cover the details shoppers (& assistants) ask about:
- What it is & what it’s made of (the blank style, fabric, fit or material)
- Sizes, colors & any size guidance
- Decoration method & care instructions
- Personalization options, if you offer them
- Who it’s for & the occasions it fits (“gift for grandma,” “teacher gift,” “ugly sweater party”)
- Production & delivery time
For print-on-demand sellers, that last point matters more than ever in Q4. Your products are made to order, so say how long production takes & link to your holiday order cutoffs. CustomCat’s 2026 Holiday Ecommerce HQ has our suggested deadlines & current production times to help you set them.
Images: use clear mockups for every color you sell, & give each image descriptive alt text (“navy unisex hoodie with snowflake design, front view”).
Step 3: Add structured data & keep your product feeds clean
Structured data is code on your product pages that spells out the facts in a format machines can read: product name, price, currency, availability, variants & reviews. Google also supports structured data for your store-wide shipping & return policies, & lets you enter those policies directly in Search Console, even without a Merchant Center account.
- Check what you already have. Most Shopify, WooCommerce & BigCommerce themes output product structured data automatically. Paste a product URL into Google’s Rich Results Test to see what’s there & what’s missing.
- Fill the gaps. The most common misses are availability, shipping details, return policy & variant information like size & color.
- Keep everything consistent. Your page, your structured data & your product feeds should all show the same price, stock & shipping info. Conflicting data makes assistants less likely to trust (& recommend) a listing.
Google Merchant Center. Google’s AI shopping features draw on its Shopping Graph, which is fed mainly by Merchant Center. If you’re not there yet, setting up free listings is one of the highest-impact steps you can take before Black Friday.
ChatGPT. OpenAI now focuses ChatGPT shopping on product discovery, with shoppers completing their purchase on the merchant’s own site. Stores not covered by a platform integration can apply to share a product feed at chatgpt.com/merchants.
Step 4: Know what your platform already does
CustomCat connects with the major ecommerce platforms, & each one plugs into AI shopping a little differently:
- Shopify: Shopify shares eligible store products with ChatGPT through its own catalog, so much of the plumbing is handled for you. Focus on your product data & check your store’s sales channel settings.
- Etsy: Etsy launched an app inside ChatGPT in May 2026 that searches its existing listings, so a live Etsy shop is already eligible. Etsy’s own guidance is to keep titles clear & under 15 words.
- WooCommerce & BigCommerce: make sure your SEO plugin or theme outputs complete product structured data, connect Google Merchant Center, & consider applying to OpenAI’s merchant program for a direct ChatGPT feed.
Step 5: Make your policies, FAQs & reviews easy to find
AI assistants try to recommend stores that shoppers can trust, & they look for the same signals people do:
- Clear shipping & return policy pages. Be specific about made-to-order items: what you accept, what you don’t, & how long customers have to reach out.
- An FAQ section on your product pages or site covering sizing, care, personalization & holiday delivery dates.
- Reviews. Ask happy customers to leave one, & display them on your product pages, not just a separate page.
- Visible holiday dates. Post your order cutoffs & any closures early, & keep them updated. CustomCat’s holiday closure schedule is posted in our 2026 Holiday Ecommerce HQ.
Step 6: Measure what AI is sending you
You can’t improve what you can’t see. A few ways to spot AI-driven visits:
- Google Analytics 4: go to Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition & look for sessions from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com & copilot.microsoft.com. Newer GA4 setups also group many of these into an “AI Assistant” channel.
- Link tags: links clicked from ChatGPT search results often arrive with
utm_source=chatgpt.comattached, which helps when the referrer is missing. - Google AI Mode & AI Overviews clicks show up as regular Google organic traffic, so they won’t appear as a separate source.
- Ask your customers. A simple “How did you hear about us?” question at checkout catches visits that analytics miss.
What you can skip
- llms.txt files. You may hear these recommended as a way to get found by AI. Google says it doesn’t use them for Search or its AI features, & there’s little evidence other assistants rely on them for shopping. They won’t hurt, but your time is better spent on product data.
- Keyword stuffing. Long, repetitive titles don’t help with conversational search & can make your listing harder to understand.
- Separate “AI-only” pages. Assistants read the same pages your customers do. Make those pages clear & complete instead.
Your holiday AI-readiness checklist
- Confirm robots.txt & your CDN allow OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot & Googlebot
- Rewrite titles for your top 10–20 holiday products in plain language
- Add materials, sizes, colors, occasions & production time to each description
- Run your top product pages through the Rich Results Test
- Set up or clean up your Google Merchant Center feed
- Add shipping & return details in Search Console or Merchant Center
- Post your holiday order cutoffs & closure dates
- Add an FAQ & make sure reviews show on product pages
- Set up a GA4 view for AI referral traffic so you can compare results after the holidays
Looking for more ways to prepare? Check out Team CustomCat’s Tips for Ruling the Holidays in 2026 & the 2026 Holiday Ecommerce HQ for order deadlines, production times & more. Happy selling!
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