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In this newsletter, you’ll find:
🤖 Follow an AI agent through your store before it shops for someone
🔎 Study of 193,000 AI answers reveals what gets websites cited
👨💻 Tweet of the day
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Together with AirOps
Your Next Content Priority Starts With This Research
Your next article costs time and budget. If AI answers the question before buyers reach your site, it’s harder to justify the investment.
AirOps brings together Kevin Indig, Ross Simmonds, and Eli Schwartz’s webinar takeaways to help you choose content worth funding next.
Kevin Indig reports informational clicks fell 35–60% over the past year. Give buyers a reason to visit with original research.
Ross Simmonds’ research covered 380,000 B2B answers. Comparison pages dominated citations, making separate “alternatives” and “versus” pages worth prioritizing.
Eli Schwartz recommends purchase-focused content with clear conversion paths.
Together, their findings give you a practical basis for deciding which pages deserve your team’s time as AI changes how buyers research.
🤖 Follow an AI agent through your store before it shops for someone
This month, Shopify launched shop.md, a skill that lets AI agents act as personal shoppers through a buyer’s Shop account.
According to coverage of the launch, agents can search more than a billion products in Shopify Catalog, use past orders to learn sizes and tastes, and check out with Shop Pay. The buyer approves each purchase, and orders land in the merchant’s admin.
A shopper can also set rules, such as a budget cap or fast shipping only.
Here’s your store from the agent’s side, step by step.
Step 1: The search
The agent reads your catalog data. Your homepage design never enters the picture. Thin descriptions, missing materials, or vague sizing make your product harder to match to a request like “waterproof hiking boots under $150 in wide fit.”
Fix: make sure every product lists materials, fit, care, and dimensions, with accurate sizes for every variant.
Step 2: The comparison
The agent compares you with similar products on price, specs, and availability. Sale pricing needs to be set up properly for the agent to see it. One guide published after the launch advises setting compare-at prices at the variant level before Black Friday.
Fix: check that sale prices sit on each variant, with the original price filled in.
Step 3: The rules
If the shopper said “fast shipping only,” products without fast delivery may drop out. If they set a budget, shipping costs count.
Fix: make sure delivery times and shipping costs in your settings reflect reality, especially for your bestsellers.
Step 4: The checkout
Purchases go through Shop Pay. The same guide warns that stores without Shop Pay enabled can appear in results but can’t be bought from through the agent.
Fix: Confirm Shop Pay is enabled in your payment settings.
Step 5: The order
The order arrives in your admin like any other. Watch for patterns: order sources, sizes ordered, and return rates for agent-placed orders, once you can identify them.
Test it yourself
Connect a Shop account, ask an agent to find a product in your category and see whether yours appears. Check that prices, stock, and descriptions match your site.
In my judgment, this matters less for its volume today and more for what it rewards: clean, complete product data. That pays off across every AI shopping surface.
Pick your five bestsellers and check each one against the four fixes above, starting with Shop Pay.
🔎 Study of 193,000 AI answers reveals what gets websites cited
A new analysis of 193,507 AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and AI Overviews reveals which content characteristics are associated with higher citation rates, offering insights for brands looking to improve AI search visibility.
The Breakdown:
Pages that answered questions immediately were cited more frequently, with 23% of cited pages providing upfront answers compared with 14% of retrieved but uncited pages.
Fresh content showed a strong association with AI citations, with pages published or updated within the past year recording 88% higher odds of being cited.
Pages featuring tables had 69% higher citation odds, while content demonstrating firsthand experience saw a 45% increase and pages displaying prices recorded 28% higher odds.
Including a year in the page title more than doubled citation odds, while schema markup showed a smaller 13% advantage. Researchers emphasized that these findings do not establish causation.
A small Google AI opt-out study found that disabling AI search visibility eliminated AI impressions but also coincided with a decline in traditional organic clicks. SEO consultant Cyrus Shepherd estimated an AI click-through rate of 0.9%, suggesting that appearing in AI answers may also encourage users to click regular search listings.
Together with Omnisend
One Plain-Text Email Outearned a Month of Campaigns
Before you send everyone the same BFCM discount, check who keeps coming back. Your repeat buyers could justify an offer of their own.
For one skincare brand, 36% of customers had ordered more than six times. Enflow Digital used Omnisend to turn that loyalty into nearly $18,000 from one plain-text email.
Omnisend helped the team:
Find purchase patterns in minutes, cutting out hours of manual analysis.
Build a VIP audience of customers with four or more orders, ready for a separate promotion.
Keep the VIP offer focused on engaged buyers by filtering out contacts inactive for 180 days.
The offer was available only through email: a higher discount plus a gift above a higher spend threshold. It increased order value while helping clear slower-selling stock.
Co-founder Karolina shares how it came together so you can apply the approach to your own repeat buyers before your BFCM offers are locked in.
🗝️ Tweet of the Day
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