Shopify store was ranking on Google. ChatGPT had never heard of it.

A friend of mine spent two years doing everything right on the SEO side. Good backlinks, optimized product pages, solid domain authority. Ranking on page one for some decent keywords.

Then one day he typed his niche into ChatGPT and asked for a recommendation.

It named four of his competitors. Didn't mention his store once.

He called me pretty annoyed about it. And honestly that conversation is what sent me down a rabbit hole I haven't come out of since.

Turns out Google and ChatGPT are playing completely different games. Google rewards authority. Backlinks, domain age, technical optimization. Build enough of it and you climb the rankings.

ChatGPT evaluates something closer to trustworthiness and relevance. Whether your brand exists in conversations real people are having. Whether AI crawlers can actually read your store's structure. Whether there are enough signals outside your own website telling the AI your store is legitimate.

Most stores that rank well on Google are completely invisible to AI. And most store owners have no idea because nobody told them the rules changed.

My friend's store wasn't the problem. The game just changed and nobody sent him the memo.

You can always use a tool like IndexGpt to check your stores visibility score to ai