Products and the catalogue

The Products screen shows which of your products appeared in AI shopping answers, on which shopper questions, and against whom. It is built by matching the product cards a surface showed against the catalogue RankX AI holds for your Website.

That matching step is the thing to understand first, because it is the one place where a gap in your setup reads as a loss in your numbers.

An incomplete catalogue reads as a loss

RankX AI can only recognise your product in an answer if it holds that product.

A product missing from the catalogue cannot be matched, so an answer that recommended it is recorded as an answer that recommended somebody else. That has two effects at once, both in the wrong direction:

• Your shopping visibility reads lower than it is.
• The Merchants list reads longer than it is, because it is built from the cards that did not match.

So before drawing any conclusion from a low visibility figure, check that the catalogue covers what you actually sell. A catalogue that is 60% complete is measuring a different shop from yours.

What the screen shows

For each of your products that has appeared:

• Which shopper questions it appeared on. This is the useful column: it tells you which intents your product is already an answer to.
• How often, against how many answers showed products at all for that question.
• Which merchants shared those answers. Every carousel has several cards, so appearing is not the same as winning, and who you appeared beside is a real competitive fact.

Every share divides by that prompt's own carousels, not by a site total. A product that appeared on two of two carousels for a niche question has a different meaning from one that appeared on two of forty for a broad one, and dividing both by the site total would erase the difference.

Reading it

Start from the questions, not from the products. A product appearing on questions nobody asks is not a win, and a product absent from the one question your category buys on is the finding.

Absence on a question where the carousel fired is real. The surface had a product opinion on that question and your product was not in it. That is actionable.

Absence on a question where no carousel fired is not. The surface had no product opinion at all, and nothing about your catalogue caused that.

Compare against Merchants on the same question. Who took the slot, and whether that merchant is a genuine rival or a marketplace listing your own product, is usually the whole answer.

The diagnosis check

RankX AI can run a separate check for a specific product to work out why it is not appearing: whether the product is present on the shopping surface at all, and what the listing looks like from that side.

It spends credits and it says so before it runs. It is worth running for a product you believe should be appearing and is not, and not worth running across a whole catalogue: the general answer is nearly always the catalogue or the listing quality, and the specific answer only matters for a product you are going to act on.

Where the catalogue comes from

Your product catalogue is Website-scoped and is set up in the Website's settings. On a connected WooCommerce store, the product list is readable through the commerce MCP tools, which is the quickest way to check what RankX AI can see against what you sell.

Keeping it current matters more than keeping it large. A catalogue with your twenty best-selling products complete and accurate measures better than one with four hundred entries, half of them stale.

What this screen cannot tell you

Why a surface chose the products it did. RankX AI records the cards that were shown. The ranking behind them is not visible to anyone outside the vendor.

Whether an appearance produced a sale. Nothing in this section is attribution. Where RankX AI reports traffic it comes from Search Console and Analytics, which are first-party and named as such.

Anything about questions you do not track. Shopping prompts are the panel; the surface is only observed on them.

Where to go next

• Merchants, for who appears instead.
• Shopping surfaces, for what each surface exposes.
• WooCommerce, for the product connection.