"The AI Mirror Test". Become the Store AI Recommends (Before Your Competitor Does)

0:00OmniSend just shipped something that I've always wanted. You can now connect OmniSend to ChatGPT or Claude and just say, where can my email and SMS campaigns be making more money? And it actually figures it out. It reads your store data, all your campaign details, your store history, and it tells you and the insights are legit good. And even better, you can then say, okay, let's fix that or build that campaign. And it actually does it right from your chat. It's wild. Now, if you're one of our listeners, you can get 30 % off for three months on OmniSend. Just go to the show notes. There's a link there.

0:31Or you can just use the code J30, J-A-Y-3-0 when you sign up. Now, if you're using another email and SMS platform and you want to switch to OmniSend, which is a great idea, they will do the migration for you. Just give them five days and then you show up with everything set, ready to go. Now, they've migrated thousands of stores from Klaviyo. And on average, they're saving 35 % on their email and SMS bills. If you're listening to this show, you clearly care about your Shopify business. If your store isn't backed up and protected, it could all be for nothing. That's why I tell every store owner I know who cares about their business, you 100 % need Rewind installed.

1:07It's a non-negotiable for me. One bad CSV import, one app that edits your store the wrong way, which has happened to basically everyone I know. One bulk edit gone wrong, and now AI making changes for you. Listen, Shopify does not have an undo button. Rewind is the undo button. Go to shopify1percent.com slash rewind for 30 days free on us. Links in the show notes too. Last year, I went to Commerce Roundtable in San Diego and it was so good. I'm going back again this year. It's September 21st and 22nd. And honestly, you should come to. It's the one e-commerce event that I recommend to everybody without blinking.

1:47It's not a trade show. There's no booth demos. It's really just operators on stage sharing what's actually working in their stores right now. and it's basically a room full of all founders. I was actually scrolling through my camera roll from last year and I have over a hundred pictures of slides from people's talks. It's, I learned so much. It's that kind of an event. Now I have five passes to give away for a 30 % off ticket. It's first come first serve. So if you're interested, email me jay at shopify1percent.com and I will hook you up. They will go fast. So email if you're interested. And if you're going, come say hi.

2:22Let's grab a coffee or a drink during happy hour. I'd love to meet you. There's a shopper out there right now, maybe dozens of them, asking ChatGPT, what's the best product in your exact category? And ChatGPT is probably going to recommend three stores. Now, whether you're one of those three has almost nothing to do with how good your product is. It has to do with whether AI can actually read and understand your store. And most of them can't read yours yet. Today, we're going to fix that. Ten minutes, and it's actually free. And by the end, you'll know exactly where you stand. Welcome back to the Shopify 1 % show.

2:59I'm Jay. And as always, the whole game here is simple. Do one thing that makes your business at least 1 % better. Not a rebrand on a 90 day transformation. Just one thing, 1 % better. Today's one thing is what I'm calling the agent intelligence optimization. Basically making your store one that AI recommends instead of your competitor. Now, by the end of this episode, you'll be able to run something I call the AI mirror test and you'll literally see how robots describe you and whether you beat your competition or not. And then you're going to make three fixes that decide whether you get recommended or get skipped.

3:32And I'll tell you now, two of those three fixes live inside a Shopify setting and most merchants don't even know it exists. We'll get there. So stick with me because if you only do one part of this episode, it's going to be that one. Let me set the table because I think a lot of people are sleeping on how fast this all happened. More than 700 million people use ChatGPT every single week. And shopping is now one of the things they do there. Over a million Shopify merchants are being made discoverable inside ChatGPT, names you know, Glossier, Skims, Viore. Now, this isn't a someday thing. Adobe tracked AI referred traffic to retail sites, and it jumped 800 % year over year.

4:16Morgan Stanley actually thinks that by 2030, nearly half of online shoppers will be using AI shopping agents in some way, driving roughly a quarter of all consumer spending. AI will drive a quarter of all consumer spending. So let me translate to that out of analysts and statistics speak. A big growing chunk of your future customers are going to ask an AI agent, what should I buy? And they're going to trust that answer. The AI becomes the shelf. It becomes the salesperson. And if you're not on that shelf and if you don't exist to that customer, they will never know you're even an option. Now, here's where it gets interesting and a little bit contrarian.

4:59For the last year, everybody got obsessed with the wrong thing. The big shiny headline was buy directly inside ChatGPT, instant checkout. And everybody scrambled to be one of the stores where you could complete a purchase inside ChatGPT. at GPT. I'm sure you saw the news on this. But then in March, just a couple months ago, this year, 2026, OpenAI quietly just pulled that whole experience back and they repositioned the whole thing around discovery. So all the people chasing the checkout gimmick, they were all aiming at the wrong target. The real game was never about selling inside AI. The real game is about being the store that AI recommends in the first place.

5:40That's where the money is. Discovery is the whole game. And the beautiful thing is that part is very winnable today by you and no matter your size or how big you are, it's the deck has been reshuffled. Now, let me make this real for you with a quick story. I was looking at one of our brands recently, a home goods brand. They're an eight figure brand doing real revenue. They have a great product and the kind of store you would be proud of. And you would say, this is a recognizable, good brand anyways. And they could not figure out why when you ask ChatGPT for the best product in their category, they sell furniture and couches and stuff.

6:20It kept recommending a smaller competitor. They beat that competitor in everything else on Google search SEO. But when they asked ChatGPT, they kept getting this competitor kept getting recommended instead of them. So we looked at how the AI was actually reading them. And the problem was almost kind of funny. Their best selling product was named, and I'm not kidding, The Hugger. That's it. Beautiful brand voice. I get it, a little chair and it's called The Hugger, but totally mystery to a robot. And the competitor's product was named with the material, the size and what it is, which it's a boring descriptive product name, but it's readable.

7:02and the AI wasn't judging their product as worse. It was, it literally could not tell what the product was. It couldn't match the hugger to the best machine washable chair that includes a, that has a throw blanket. Anyways, they didn't know that. And the description was also a little bit vague. So it skipped it and it recommended a store that it could understand. They cleaned up their titles and all the specs on their top sellers, added FAQs, added detailed spec sections of what it is, what materials are made of. And actually very fast, I think it was within two to three weeks, they started showing up and getting recommended ahead of their competition.

7:38It was actually much easier than they thought, which with traditional SEO, you might have to spend months or years getting all the backlinks. You just need good information on your site, telling ChatGPT what you're selling. So that's the whole lesson of this episode, kind of in one story, but we're going to go deeper. But the AI isn't grading your taste and how good your product is. We think we like to think it is. We like to think that ChatGPT knows what the best fishing lure is or what's the best case for my phone or we like to think it does, but it's just reading data. And if it can't read you, it can't recommend you.

8:15So let's fix that. Three easy steps. The AI mirror test. Step one of the mirror test. You can't fix what you can't see. So step one is just looking. And this is the part that you can do today. In fact, I want you to do it today. Takes 10 minutes. Open up all the AI tools, Gemini, ChatGPT, Cloud, Perplexity, ones that customers are actually using. And Microsoft Copilot, I would throw in there as well too. Now, you don't need to start with all four, but I would recommend it if you start with only one chat GPT is a good one and Google in AI mode. So not Google search, but when you go to Google and you type something in there, or actually you can, there's a button right on it to go into AI mode.

8:59So I'm sure you know what AI mode is. Anyways, that covers the majority of what customers are using to find products. Now type in the kind of real thing that a customer would type. Don't type your brand name. Don't type your company name. Type in a question. A customer doesn't know your brand name yet. Remember that's the whole point. They're going to ask what's the best black shirt that doesn't fade after I wash it 20 times? That's the question they're going to ask. They're not going to ask the best black shirt. They're going to ask a specific question. What's the, I've used this example on other shows.

9:32What's a woman's purse, the largest size purse that fits in an overhead bin on an airplane, like something like that. I'm kind of, you can structure it with, I'm looking for the best. under X dollars. Give me three stores you recommend. Then once it recommends some stuff, just pretend you're shopping. Do what you would do if you're looking for the product. You might say, what are the most trusted brands in furniture? What are the brands that are the most reliable in furniture or whatever your category is? Okay. And then this one might hurt, might sting a little bit, but say, compare this, you're typing this into ChatGPT, compare your store name to your competitor name and see what it says.

10:22Now, I will say this, make sure you are in incognito mode and signed out of ChatGPT because ChatGPT likes to brown nose and tell you how good you are. And it's not what your customers are going to see. So make sure you're doing it not within your account. It needs to be a fresh account. And then ask, say, compare this store to this store. It'll be fascinating. So now sit there, read it, read what it says about you, read it out loud. I might hurt, it might sting, but do it. And what you're doing is you're looking for three things. One, do you show up at all? Okay, so when you're asking it for the best product in your category, are you even being recommended?

11:07Two, when you do, is the description accurate? Does it actually describe what you sell or is it vague or is it wrong? Which often it is because it might be pulling that information from what people say in reviews or in other areas. And so that's question two. And then three, what is it saying about your competitors that it isn't saying about you? Write it all down. Make those notes. Screenshot it. This is your baseline. This is the baseline of your mirror test. Are you even showing up when you do? Is it accurate? And what is it saying about your competitors? Now, I'll be honest for a lot of you, this, yeah, it's going to sting.

11:46You might find AI recommending a competitor that you don't even respect. You think they are worse than you. In fact, you know, they're worse than you and that's okay. We're going to fix that. And the sting is actually useful because that's the gap that we're closing. So one pro move here is run the same prompts again in a week after you've made these fixes and you'll have a before and after, and you'll start to feel better about that sting. And that's how you prove to yourself this is actually working. Okay, so let's move to step two. That's step one. Step two is you're going to make sure that you're even in the room.

12:19So step one told you how you look. Step two, make sure you're even on the shelf to begin with. And this is the one Shopify setting almost nobody knows about. And the one I promised you up at the top of the show. And here's the good news. It's genuinely good news. Shopify has been doing a lot of heavy lifting for you. In fact, everyone who's listening right now should tweet Shopify or thank them for all the hard work they do to just a lot of getting found on chat GPT. The heavy lifting is done. So you should be thankful for that. Kudos to Shopify. They do an amazing job for this. Now, they built something called agentic storefronts.

12:56And Toby, the CEO of Shopify, he said plainly, Shopify, his exact words were, he wants to make Shopify, every store agent ready by default. So even if you don't do anything, your store is agent ready. The word default matters. That means Shopify takes your products and syndicates it out to all the AI channels, ChatGPT, Copilot, Google AI mode through something. It's called Shopify Catalog, which ultimately is the database of products with extremely good data. So we're talking hundreds, multiple hundreds of data points, not just color and size. everything that like material and, you know, waterproofness and whatever else that someone would ask an AI.

13:48Now you don't have to integrate with each AI platform one by one. That's already done for you. That's the hard work. You set it up once you go and Shopify will push your catalog everywhere. That's the massive gift, especially if you're smaller team without developers. But, and this is the part that I need you to actually go check the on by at the beginning of the show, I told you why everyone serious about their Shopify business should have their store backed up and protected with Rewind. There is no excuse not to. There literally is no undo button for Shopify. Shopify's own terms actually say that your data is 100 % your responsibility, your products, your theme, your customizations, your settings, everything.

14:31They don't back up any of it. And no, a CSV export does not cover it. With CSV exports, there's no images, no meta fields, no themes, settings, etc. Nothing. I was talking to the people at Rewind about a brand where one team member actually ran a bulk update and accidentally overwrote 11 ,000 products, orders, customers, contacts, all of it gone in a single action. Luckily though, with Rewind, it was a simple one-click rollback. It could be anything, a bad CSV import, a random app you just installed that messes everything up, or all of these AI tools that everyone's using to manage their store now.

15:08I have heard so many horror stories. Rewind just gives you peace of mind no matter what. If you don't have Rewind installed, you absolutely should have it. Go now and get it. Shopify1 %.com slash Rewind. You'll get an exclusive 30 days free on me. The link is also in the show notes. At the top of the show, I mentioned OmniSend can now talk to ChatGPT and Claude. And I want to tell you why that's even bigger than it sounds. So if you missed it, quick catch up. OmniSend is what I use for email and SMS on every Shopify store I work with, plus for this show as well. And you can now connect your AI, Claude, ChatGPT straight to your OmniSend account.

15:48Your data, your campaigns, your flows, everything. You open a chat and you ask, what should I focus on this week to make more money? And it will come back with real answers about your store, which flow is underperforming, which automation needs improvement, which customers are going quiet, what's missing, everything. My favorite part though is AI segments. I used to build these by hand clicking through filters forever. Now I just type something like customers who bought twice but ignored my last campaign and it just builds it. and anything it writes already sounds exactly like your brand because it pulls from all your previous emails from your website, your logo, your color, your voice, everything.

16:28I've been doing this for 15 years and this is the closest I've ever felt to having a full-time marketer sitting right beside me. I have a link for you in the show notes that will give you 30 % off for your first three months or you can just use code J30 when you sign up, J-A-Y-3-0. If you're ready to migrate from Klaviyo to Omnisend like thousands of others, they will do everything for you. You just show up and all your campaigns and automations from Klaviyo will be set up and running in OmniSend, ready to go. And usually at 35 % less what you were paying Klaviyo. Default is not the same as on for sure.

17:02So two things happen in the real world. One is eligibility is rolling out in phases. So not everyone will, this might not be switched on for you yet. And two, and this is the one that kills me, but a bunch of merchants got nervous about AI and they got protective. and they turned it off. And so you may have even accidentally turned it off. They, or you might've opted out of it at some point, which if you do, and if discovery is the game, it's like showing up to the trade show and then hiding your booth under a blanket. No one will go, no one will see you. So go look in your Shopify admin, head to settings, then go to sales channels and then find a Gentic.

17:40The exact naming, I think it might just be a Gentic storefronts, I think right now, it changed recently, but you'll see, it'll be obvious. Find the agentic storefront section. And Shopify is also rolling out its own agentic section right now on the sidebar. So you might see it there. Depending when you're listening to, you'll see it there probably as well, too. And when you're there, you're going to check for a few things. Is each AI channel turned on? First and foremost, is your Shopify catalog access active for the channels you care about? So make sure the channels are on and make sure your catalog is is on now there's usually an allow shopify to manage for me option and for most of you leaving that on is probably the right call like let shopify do do the work and if you want direct checkout inside the a channel ai channels you'll need your store policies all filled in your terms privacy return policy under settings policies uh and of course payment providers all set up.

18:37And then that just works because with ShopPay and Shopify checkout, it actually just works. So you'll have the most forward leading checkout within AI in that space. So you kind of don't even have to worry about that. Now the newest version of this section is actually really useful because Shopify now shows you per channel rank data, how you're performing in each AI channel and what people are actually searching to find you, which is gold. That's the AI mirror test from step one that we talked about, except Shopify is running it for you in the background. Now, quick note on this. If you're on a headless or in hydrogen setup, your situation's a little bit different.

19:18You own more of the technical plumbing yourself. So don't assume catalog covers everything. That's just worth a conversation with your developer. If you're just using a normal Shopify theme, this is kind of who I'm talking to with this section. If you're using a headless or hydrogen setup, double check with your dev to make sure that the catalog is connected. So but for the vast majority of you on any standard Shopify storefront, this is just a settings check, not a whole new project, which is huge. So that's step two, confirm you're switched on and Shopify is actually feeding your catalog to the agents.

19:53Don't hide the booth. Okay, step three, feed the machine, as I like to say. Okay, so you've, you've looked in the mirror, the test, You've done the AI mirror test. You've confirmed that you're in the room. So step three is the one that actually moves the needle on getting recommended. And it's about the quality of your data that you're feeding the machine. Now, here's the mental model. The AI is basically a really fast, literal human shopping assistant. If you want to think about how it works, imagine someone, you know, like a celebrity who has a shopping assistant, but is like lightning speed.

20:30Okay. That's how you should think about AI. It's matching what the customer asked. So their celebrity who has a personal shopping assistant and they say, I need you to find me this outfit, this wardrobe. It needs to be this material, this size. It has to have this type of, I don't know, buttons, not zipper or whatever. It tells them everything they need, matching everything that they asked for against what it can understand about your products and everyone else's products. Now the cleaner and more complete your data, the better it can match you. It's that simple. The more vague your data, the more you'll get skipped.

21:09Sorry, the more you'll get skipped. Remember the hugger, okay? Don't be the hugger. So here's what you actually fix. And I want you to start with just your top 20 % of products by revenue. Don't stress about this if you have hundreds of products. Remember the 80-20 rule. most of your revenue is probably coming from 10 or 20 products so start with your top ones and don't try to do them all at once um but yeah pick your top ones your best sellers will carry most of your revenue so let's fix those for each of these products walk through this uh i'm going to give you a bunch of points here i don't know if you want to take notes or not but titles um your product title is should describe what the thing is not just what you cleverly named it as now Now, brand name is fine.

21:55You can have that. But pack in the attributes as well too, as much as you can. Material, size, use case, you know, merino wool base layer, men's mid-weight is way better than the summit. And it will win every single day to a robot. So in your title, actually try to add as much descriptive words as you can without it being a paragraph. but as much descriptive words as you can. Now, okay, that's titles. Now, descriptions, they need to be complete, specific, and factual. The AI is looking for stuff a customer asks about, like dimensions, materials. What is it comparable with? What is the problem it solves?

22:41Who is it for? If a customer would ask it, your description should answer it. And a lot of times, this actually lives in FAQs. FAQs are incredibly important to AI. Every product should have at least 10 FAQs and they can be down at the bottom. They're not going to clog up your product or make it look ugly, but an AI will read it. And you can use, you can have tabbed sections. I mean, once something's below the fold and it's basically for AI anyway, you know, most customers don't scroll down. So put as much as you can there. I use this example on another episode, but like if you sold fishing lures, what type of fish are they for?

23:18What type of fish can you catch it? Because people are going to ask ChatGPT, what's the best fishing lure to catch walleye? in a cold climate. So like literally your description would need to say that. Okay. So description now attributes and specs. Now this is unglamorous, but it's one that wins. So fill in the actual structured fields in Shopify. And there's a lot of them, but make sure they are all filled in everything, size, color, material, weight, category on standard Shopify catalog. on standard Shopify catalog uses these there's a whole ton of them but they use these to organize and match you and actually try to find you and match you into categories in Google and ChatGPT so even Shopify doesn't know exactly what your product is you need to tell Shopify because it's the one syncing you to these AIs so make sure every single field is filled out empty fields are just going to be mismatches.

24:19Okay, that's number three. So titles, descriptions, attributes, number three, price and availability. Hopefully this one's a little bit obvious, but it's important. So make sure it's accurate. One of the reasons that the in chat buying stuff struggled early was bad price and inventory data. Now, if your data says in stock, and you're not the AI learns not to trust you. So it's like pattern recognition is a real thing with AI. So if you break trust once, it won't recommend you again in the future. So just make sure that your inventory and stock levels are accurate and your prices are accurate as well.

24:57So just keep that really tight. The next thing, reviews and ratings. Now, AI assistants lean hard on social proof, just like humans. Just like a lot of times you buy something, you don't even read the description. You don't even trust it. You don't trust what they're saying. You go right down to the reviews. And that's what AI does too. And if you've got a reviews app, make sure those ratings are flowing and visible on the product and in a real way. Now, the more real reviews, the better, the better structured equal or sorry. And the better they're structured, not just a plus plus plus or five stars equals more trust in A.I.

25:35eyes. Now, this is an easy thing to say. And I know you're probably listening and going, well, how do I get more reviews? and you know what I would all I would suggest is build a strategy around it like make sure when your product arrives at a customer at that moment of delight you're asking for a review maybe you actually personally reach out to them um and how you ask for the review matters too like don't just say I get so many emails that I just cringe at that it just it says how did you like it and it just like five stars and I click it but ask questions if someone clicks the five star to leave the review, say, ask three questions.

26:15What did you like most about it? Why did you choose to buy it? Because those are things that AI is going to ingest and understand what customers are loving about your product. So the more you can prompt your customers to write useful reviews like that, the better. Not just like, OMG, five stars, I love it. That does nothing for AI. Even though that's a good review and you love it and it's good for your page, like it looks good. It does nothing for AI. What you want is those long reviews saying why they like it. And someone's like, I was looking for a backpack for my kid. That's not too heavy and doesn't hurt my son's shoulders when we walk around all day.