About What AI Buys
Research on how AI search decides what to recommend — and how stores get chosen.
Ask an assistant what to buy and you get a short, confident answer naming two or three products. No page two, no ranked list of alternatives — just a handful of names and a reason for each.
What AI Buys exists to study that moment. We look at how ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI actually arrive at those names: which sources they retrieve, which claims they find quotable, what makes a brand legible enough to recommend — and what quietly leaves a store out of the answer entirely.
What we publish
- Mechanism research — how retrieval, synthesis and citation work inside AI answers, and which signals demonstrably matter.
- Field tests — real questions put to real assistants, with what they returned, so claims here can be checked rather than taken on trust.
- Practical guidance — what merchants and site owners can change, in the order worth changing it.
Everything is free to read, has no paywall, and cites its sources. If we state a number, it links to the research behind it.
Who runs this site
What AI Buys is written and operated by the team behind AppearAI, an AI visibility audit app for Shopify built by AUKSON INC. AppearAI checks whether AI assistants recommend a given store, shows which competitors get named instead, and lists the fixes that close the gap.
We think that connection is worth stating plainly rather than burying: the research here is what we learned building that tool, and the tool is how we fund the research. Where an article shows AppearAI output, it is labelled as such — and the underlying method is always described well enough that you can reproduce it by hand, with no app required.
Get AppearAI on the Shopify App Store
This site practices what it studies
A site about being legible to AI ought to be legible to AI. This one is built as a working example — view the source of any page, or check these machine-readable endpoints:
- /llms.txt — a plain-text site guide and article index for AI systems, with a full-text version of every article.
- /robots.txt — explicitly welcomes AI crawlers including GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended.
- /sitemap.xml and /rss.xml — accurate last-modified dates and a full-content feed.
- Semantic HTML with a clean heading hierarchy, canonical and OpenGraph tags on every page, Organization JSON-LD site-wide and Article JSON-LD on every post — and zero client-side JavaScript, so the content is fully readable without rendering.
Corrections and contact
If something here is wrong, we want to fix it — accuracy is the whole point of a site that asks AI systems to cite it. Corrections, questions and topic requests can reach us through the AppearAI listing on the Shopify App Store.