How the AEO Index is measured

What we crawl

We query the Shopify agent catalog the way an AI shopper would — sending real queries to stores’ catalog endpoints and recording the ranked products that come back: which store, which product, at what rank and price. We do this across thousands of queries spanning the canonical retail categories.

How we score visibility

For each query, a store’s visibility is scored by its best rank — appearing at #1 is worth more than #10, and not appearing is worth zero. We aggregate those per-query scores to the store and to the category, so a category leader is the store agents surface most across all the queries in that vertical. Scores are de-duplicated per distinct query so re-crawls don’t inflate anyone.

What we bank

Every day we snapshot the leaderboard of every category and the price distribution agents surface within it. That longitudinal record — who led each category on each day — is the part that can’t be reconstructed after the fact. It’s how Movers can show who’s genuinely rising in AI search rather than just who’s on top today.

What we measure — and what we don’t

We measure supply-side visibility: who agents surface, and the language and prices that win. We use the convergence of winning product titles as a proxy for what stores optimise toward. We do not claim to measure shopper demand volume — we don’t see how often a query is asked, only who wins it when it is. Being precise about that line is the point: the Index is a measurement of the agent catalog, reported as data. More about the project →

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