Notes from the build floor.
Real lessons from shipping software, growing brands, and making the internet a little less broken.
Why AI Assistants Don't Recommend Your Store — and How to Fix It
Over the 2025 holidays, shoppers arriving from AI assistants converted 31% higher than any other channel (Adobe Analytics). The catch: the average retail product page is only 66% readable by the AI doing the recommending. About a third of it — sizing, materials, the answers shoppers actually want — sits locked inside images a machine can't read. So when someone asks ChatGPT what to buy, it names the store it can read. Not yours. A year ago, AI traffic converted 38% worse than paid search. This spring it converted 42% better. Same channel, opposite verdict. The stores winning it didn't outbid anyone. Their pages were just legible. I wrote up what separates a store AI recommends from one it skips — the nine things to check, and the two that close most of the gap. How many of your top product pages could an AI actually read start to finish right now?
