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 published by MIVO INC., a Colorado (USA) corporation. Its founder also owns AUKSON INC., which builds AppearAI, a commercial Shopify app. AppearAI is disclosed wherever relevant and does not appear in any current ranking.
Contact: hello@whataibuys.com.
AppearAI is an AI visibility audit app for Shopify. It 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.
To be exact about which is which:
- What AI Buys — this site. A research publication. Free, no paywall, no signup, the August candle-study CSV is downloadable. It sells nothing.
- AppearAI — a commercial Shopify app built by AUKSON INC., a company owned by the same founder. It has a free plan and a paid report. It is not required to use anything published here.
We do not review AppearAI, rank it against competitors, or present it as a research finding. When a published measurement happens to involve it — as in the candle study, where its output supplied two screenshots — the article says so in the sentence where it appears.
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. No content depends on client-side JavaScript — every page is fully readable, and every claim extractable, from the raw HTML with scripting disabled. The only script we load is a deferred Cloudflare Web Analytics beacon, which sets no cookies and collects no personal data; the page reads identically if it fails to load.
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: hello@whataibuys.com.