Merchants
The merchants whose products were recommended in AI shopping answers alongside or instead of yours, each with its share of the offers, and how to read the list.
Merchants is the list of sellers whose products were recommended in AI shopping answers, ranked by how often each merchant appeared over the last 28 days. It is built from the product cards that did not match a product you monitor, and each merchant carries its share of the offers: of every product card shown in those answers, yours included, the share that was theirs.
Your own store on this list
A card whose merchant names your own store is labelled Your store here. It is one of your products that the answers recommended and that is not yet in your monitored set, and RankX AI offers it back to you as a suggestion in products monitored. Once it is monitored, its appearances count in your own figures.
Your own share of the offers sits in the same table, on the same denominator as every rival's, so the comparison is like for like.
Marketplaces are not always rivals
A marketplace on this list may be selling your own product, and RankX AI labels the best-known marketplaces as such.
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, and a listing-copy proposal rewrites one for your approval.
What the list records
The cards that were shown. RankX AI records every product card a surface showed, with its merchant. The selection logic behind each card stays inside the surface's vendor.
Paid placement where a surface exposes it. ChatGPT Shopping flags sponsored results, and RankX AI records that flag. See Ads for how each surface handles it.
Your tracked shopping questions. The list is built from your shopping prompts, so it widens every time you add one.
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, and tell me which of them are my own store's products that I do not monitor yet."
See the tool reference.
Where to go next
- Products monitored, 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.
Last updated
Products monitored
How RankX AI chooses the products it watches for in AI shopping answers, what the Products screen tells you about each one, and how to act on a finding.
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.