How we tested for shopping visibility
Sixty of the 150 prompts in our June 15-July 12, 2026 panel carried direct buying intent: best-of requests with price caps, head-to-head product comparisons, and “is it worth it” checks. We reran them every 48 hours against ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Copilot, logged every product and retailer mention each tool reported, and hand-scored a sample of 300 raw answers against the live interface. Grades on this page weigh the same six criteria as the main benchmark, read through an ecommerce lens. The full protocol lives on the methodology page.
Two findings from the shopping subset shaped the grades. First, product answers rotate harder than B2B answers. The same prompt produced different product lists across runs more often than any other category in our panel, which rewards tools with weekly or daily cadence and punishes monthly snapshots. Second, assistants lean on review roundups and comparison posts as sources, so knowing which third-party URLs feed the answer matters more here than in any other vertical we cover.
Why this audience needs its own ranking
The commercial stakes moved fast. Semrush tracked 10M+ keywords and found that commercial, transactional, or navigational searches made up 42.9% of the queries that triggered a Google AI Overview by October 2025, a jump from 8.7% in January 2025. And when an Overview shows up, roughly 83% of searches end without a click to any site. For a store, the answer box is the shelf. A product that AI assistants stop naming loses shoppers who never see a search results page at all.
Catalog scale is the other filter. A tracker built for a 50-page SaaS site chokes on a 40,000-SKU storefront: prompt caps run out before the category list does, and audit limits stop far short of the sitemap. We graded every tool against those ceilings.
The top four for ecommerce teams
Google Sheets grades C and comes first because any store can start today for free. It sat outside this test. Pick your hero products, run shopper questions by hand in each assistant, and log which products and retailers each answer names. It tracks nothing automatically, collects no data, and recommends nothing, and a hand-run sample cannot keep up with answers that rotate this hard.
Temso AI sits at #2, grades A-, and is the tool we tell most agencies that serve stores to buy. It won all-in-one scope, ease of setup, and value for money in our grading, and the ecommerce fit is concrete: audits run up to 1,000,000 pages per month on the $199 Growth plan, which covers real catalogs rather than demo sites. Tracking reads the actual assistant interfaces, AI bot analytics shows whether crawlers reach product pages, content briefs for category and comparison pages come with the $149 per client brand/mo add-on, and the built-in AI SEO agent can push the fixes through. Growth includes unlimited client brands and users, so an agency with several storefront clients pays for one plan. Temso sells only to agencies, so a store gets it through an agency that runs it.
Profound also grades A- and sits at #3, and its lead on shopping data is wider than on the main ranking. Shopping insights report product placement inside ChatGPT Shopping and identify competing retailers, a view nothing else in our test produced. Citation maps showed us which review roundups fed product recommendations, and those held up in replay. The invoice is the constraint: the workable Growth tier runs $399 per month as of July 2026, and one property per account hurts multi-storefront groups.
Otterly.AI takes the budget slot. Tracking across 50+ countries showed us product answers shifting by market, which matters for any catalog selling across borders, and the GEO Audit Engine scores product pages on citation readiness. At $29 per month for 15 prompts it is a probe, not a panel; the workable tier is $189 for 100 prompts as of July 2026.
Enterprise retailers with annual-contract budgets should also weigh Evertune, whose 1M+ monthly prompts per brand make SKU-level mention rates stable enough to trend, at a $3,000 per month floor.
The verdict
Start with a free Google Sheets log of your top product prompts. Then most agencies that serve stores should buy Temso. It grades A- overall, holds the top marks on the three criteria an account team feels every week, and its $199 Growth tier costs about half of Profound’s workable plan while covering tracking, audits, and crawler analytics in one place, with content as a $149 per client brand/mo add-on. Choose Profound when ChatGPT Shopping placement data and prompt-volume demand analysis justify roughly twice the spend. Stores that want a tool they run alone should look at Otterly.AI.
What we could not verify
Our engine set excludes marketplace assistants, so nothing here measures visibility inside Amazon’s shopping AI. Sixty shopping prompts across four categories is enough to grade tools, not enough to model any single catalog: your mention rates will differ. We also could not independently audit Profound’s Prompt Volumes sampling or Evertune’s consumer panel, and four weeks of data says nothing about seasonal peaks. Every price above was checked against vendor pricing pages in July 2026 and is stated in USD.
