We asked 16 shopping questions to ChatGPT & Google AI Mode on 10/19/2026 (1x each time from the US) and monitored the destinations of all the answers. From "best running shoes for flat feet under $150" to "buy a 6 person camping tent" to "where can I buy a cast iron skillet" and more. This is the store that was barely represented.
In 11 of the 16 answers ChatGPT displayed the product cards (clickable product tiles in the answer). That's 27 product cards total. 23 of them had a price listed.
By type of store 14 product cards were for big stores like Walmart, Best Buy, Dick's, REI, etc. 7 were for the brand's store. 1 was for a specialty store. 5 were for media sites or no link.
Most commonly ChatGPT listed Walmart as the source of the answer. 13 times of the 16 answers. Followed by Home Depot (7), Best Buy (7).
Amazon had 1 product card in the whole test.
We looked at amazon's robots.txt (the robots.txt file is used by automated programs to indicate which pages they are allowed to access) on the day of the test and it was blocking OpenAI's search bot (as well as the ChatGPT-User agent). We revisited the file on 11 Nov 2026 and it continues to contain OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User and a 3rd OpenAI bot (GPTBot). Each of these are followed with "Disallow: /" -- which blocks access to the entire site. It's difficult to see why an AI which can't access the store pages would be pushing shoppers there. Links were counted -- so we didn't investigate the 'why' -- and this is a lead, not a definite reason.
Card inclusion isn't simply a numbers game. 7 of the 27 cards were direct links to the manufacturer's site. E.g. Brooks (running shoes), Woom (kids bike)
For Google AI mode: For 12 of the 16 answers, product names are linked to Google's own shopping listings. Total of 71 links (not to a store). These are fed by Google's Merchant Center feeds (where a store provides a list of products with price and stock levels) -- so a store's feed is their storefront in Google. The most heavily linked site (Wirecutter -- a review site) was 15 times.
It is obvious... 16 questions, 1 run, 1 day, and shopping answers depend on stock, prices, location of the shopper... Another run might not be the same.
Ram writes about this for RankControl, an AI SEO and AEO platform. RankControl's AI visibility tracker tracks citations across 7 AI engines and checks 50 of your buyers' questions every week. The full write-up has the totals for both engines and the five things that decide whether an AI shopping agent can pick your store.