Merchants
The merchants whose products were recommended instead of yours in AI shopping answers, and why an incomplete catalogue inflates the list.
Merchants is the list of sellers whose products were recommended in AI shopping answers where yours were not. It is built from the product cards that did not match your catalogue, ranked by how often each merchant appeared, over the last 28 days.
That construction is the first thing to know about it, because it means one gap in your setup makes this list longer than it should be.
An incomplete catalogue inflates this list
Every card RankX AI cannot match to one of your products is attributed to the merchant that sold it. A product missing from your catalogue is therefore counted as a competitor's win.
So a long Merchants list has two possible causes, and they need different work:
| If | Then |
|---|---|
| Your catalogue is complete | The list is real competition, and it is the useful kind of bad news |
| Your catalogue has gaps | Some of these entries are you, recorded as somebody else |
Check the product catalogue before you act on this screen. It is the cheapest possible correction and it changes both this list and your visibility figure at once.
Marketplaces are not always rivals
The second thing that inflates the list, and it is not a defect either.
If your products are also sold through a marketplace or a reseller, that seller's cards will appear here. Commercially, an answer recommending your product through a marketplace is a partial win rather than a loss: the product was chosen and the margin was not yours.
Read the list with that in mind. The entries worth acting on are the ones selling a different product, not the ones selling yours through someone else's checkout.
How to use it
Look at breadth, not just volume. A merchant appearing on many different shopper questions is positioned across your category. One appearing many times on a single question owns that question. Those are different problems.
Cross-reference with the questions. Merchants is most useful filtered to the questions you care about, because a merchant that dominates a segment you do not sell into is not your competitor.
Compare with your competitor set. If the merchants here are not the competitors you named during onboarding, one of the two lists is wrong, and correcting the competitor set improves every comparison in the product.
Look at what their listings do that yours do not. These surfaces read product listings. A thin description, a missing attribute or an absent price is a common reason a product is not selected, and it is fixable. The product list tool flags products whose description is too thin to sell or rank.
What it cannot tell you
Why a merchant was chosen. RankX AI records the cards that were shown. The selection behind them is not visible to anyone outside the vendor.
Whether a merchant paid for the placement, except on the one surface that exposes advertising at all. See Ads.
Anything on questions you do not track. This is built from your shopping prompts.
Driving this from an assistant
list_shopping_competitors returns the list, and the useful prompt states the
caveat rather than making you remember it:
"Show me the merchants recommended instead of my products over the last 28 days. Tell me how complete my catalogue is first, because gaps in it inflate that list."
See the tool reference.
Where to go next
- Products and the catalogue, which is what this list is measured against.
- Ads, for where placement is paid and where that is unknowable.
- Shopping surfaces, for what each surface exposes.
Products and the catalogue
How RankX AI matches shown product cards against your catalogue, why an incomplete catalogue reads as a loss, and what the Products screen tells you.
Ads
Where advertising is observable in AI shopping answers and where it is not. One surface has no sponsored flag, so its zero means unknown.