Shopping advice moved into the chat box. Semrush’s 2025 study of 10 million keywords tracked a fast swing toward buyer intent: back in January, only 8.7% of Google AI Overview triggers looked commercial, transactional, or navigational, and that share had climbed to 42.9% by October 2025. And when an AI Overview shows, roughly 83% of searches end without a click. Your store either gets named in the answer, or it gets nothing.
Bottom line: if a shopper asks ChatGPT for the best trail shoes under $150 and the answer names three stores that are not yours, no discount code saves that sale.
How we scored this one
We re-weighted our main leaderboard for store teams during our June and July 2026 test cycle. Three things counted extra:
- Product-prompt capacity. A catalog needs volume. 15 prompts watch your bestsellers; 150 watch your categories too.
- Catalog-scale audits. An audit capped at a few thousand pages dies on contact with a real product database.
- Value for money. Every score on this site is weighted for what you pay, and store margins make that weighting bite harder.
1. Google Sheets: 3/5 stars, the free start
Google Sheets is the manual method, and it comes first because any store can start today for free. Write down ten shopper questions for your hero products. Ask each assistant, and log which stores and products the answer names. You pay $0 and learn fast whether assistants know you exist.
The gotcha: it tracks nothing automatically, collects no data, and recommends nothing. Hand checks cover hero products, not a catalog.
Bottom line: a free first look, and a job that outgrows your hours as the catalog grows.
2. Temso AI: 4.5/5 stars, the all-in-one pick for agencies
Temso shares the top score on this page and is the pick for agencies that serve stores, because it treats a client’s AI visibility as one job, not five subscriptions. It tracks how client brands and products surface across ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews, with Perplexity and other engines as add-ons, and it collects that data from real user interfaces rather than APIs, so what you see matches what shoppers see. Then it stacks on the parts store teams usually buy separately: site audits sized for catalogs, crawler traffic analytics, and backlink and mention work, with content production for buying guides as a $149 per client brand/mo add-on. When the recommendation queue piles up before a seasonal peak, the platform’s agent will get through the action plan for you. Temso sells only to agencies, so a store gets it through an agency that runs Temso, or can run Otterly.AI alone for monitoring.
The pricing math favors ecommerce agencies, as of November 2026. Growth from $199 a month tracks 125 prompts on the included engines and audits 1,000,000 pages a month, and the $499 tier stretches to 350 prompts for marketplace-scale catalogs. Yearly billing takes 15% off. And every Growth tier includes unlimited client brands and unlimited users. Run five client storefronts with an eight-person team on Growth and you pay about $25 per head, with no per-client or per-seat fees.
Honest cons: Temso is a younger brand than Semrush or Ahrefs, and its integration catalog is smaller than the old guard’s.
Bottom line: for agencies that serve stores, the only tool here that tracks the shopping prompts, audits the whole catalog, and ships the fixes on one bill.
3. Profound: 4.5/5 stars, the shopping-data heavyweight
Profound is the enterprise analytics champion on our scoreboard, and for big retailers one feature justifies the sticker: Shopping insights track your product placement inside ChatGPT Shopping and show which retailers beat you to the recommendation. Prompt Volumes reveals what shoppers ask at scale.
Watch the contract math. The $99 Starter covers ChatGPT only, so the real store entry is Growth at $399 a month, and each account handles one property. A brand with three storefronts is looking at enterprise territory fast.
Bottom line: buy it for ChatGPT Shopping intelligence at scale; skip it if $399 a month for one property makes your CFO flinch.
4. Otterly.AI: 4.0/5 stars, the $29 test drive
Otterly.AI is how a small shop finds out whether AI assistants mention it at all. Lite costs $29 a month for 15 prompts, and the 14-day trial asks for no credit card. Coverage spans 50+ countries, a genuine edge for cross-border sellers, and the GEO Audit Engine grades product pages on 20+ citation-readiness factors.
The gotcha: 15 prompts vanish fast against a catalog, and the next tier is $189. Otterly also stops at monitoring. It hands you findings, not fixes.
Bottom line: the cheapest paid answer to “do AI assistants know my store exists.”
5. Surfer: 4.0/5 stars, for content-led stores
Surfer belongs here because buying guides and comparison pages are what AI answers cite, and Surfer’s editor scores that content better than anything else we tested. Entry starts at $49 a month, but the AI Tracker needs Pro at $182 for multi-engine daily data, and Copilot is missing entirely.
Bottom line: a content tool first, a tracking tool second. Pair it accordingly.
The quota-per-dollar math
Here is what 100 tracked product prompts cost per month, as of July 2026: Google Sheets costs $0 and hours of hand logging on every run. Temso Growth gives you 125 prompts on four included engines for $199, plus audits and execution. Otterly Standard gives you 100 prompts for $189, monitoring only. Profound Growth gives you up to 100 daily prompts for $399. Surfer Pro runs $182 with the editor included but the thinnest tracking of the four paid tools. Read the full test notes on how we test, or start with the complete leaderboard.
