Field notes

Notes from the citation graph

Observations on AI search visibility for Shopify merchants. What ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are citing this month, what's shifting in the retrieval layer, and what to actually do about it.

Research

YouTube predicts AI visibility better than anything else measured

Across 75,000 brands, YouTube mentions correlate with AI visibility at 0.737, ahead of every other factor Ahrefs measured. Where the effect is real (Gemini, AI Overviews, Grok), where it rounds to zero (ChatGPT, Claude), and what to film.

12 June 2026 · 9 min read Read
Playbook

What an AI assistant can read on your product page (and what it can't)

None of the major AI crawlers render JavaScript, 44.2% of ChatGPT citations come from a page's first 30%, and schema didn't move citations across 1,885 tracked pages. The five-step product page rebuild, with the evidence behind each step.

5 June 2026 · 9 min read Read
Research

What ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini cite when shoppers ask what to buy

Across our 40-store cohort, 67% of the sources Gemini cites on product queries are ranked lists. Product pages take 6%. What the three assistants cite, with data from 400 million citations, and what to publish instead.

29 May 2026 · 10 min read Read
Research

85% of your AI visibility lives on sites you don't own

AirOps classified 21,311 brand mentions across ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity: 85% came from third-party pages, nine in ten of them listicles, comparisons or reviews. Where the mentions live, and the September shift that repriced them.

22 May 2026 · 10 min read Read
Playbook

How AI assistants pick which Shopify store to recommend

ChatGPT generates a quarter of its answers without fetching a single web page. Gemini cites no source in 92% of replies. So what actually decides whether your store gets recommended? Five levers, with a four-week sequence to move them.

15 May 2026 · 9 min read Read

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