Your customers are asking ChatGPT about your products. What does it say?
A conversational assistant never visits your shop: it reads your pages and answers in place of your salesperson. What it reads there does not depend on your advertising budget — it is a property of your site. Here is what five product pages from French distributors gave it to read on 20 October 2026. ChatGPT is only one example: what follows holds for every automated reader, and the measurement below tested ten of them.
What changed without asking your opinion
Your site had two audiences: buyers, and the robot of a search engine that files your pages away to offer them later. A third reader has arrived, and that one does not file: it summarises. Your product page no longer shows up in a list, it is quoted inside a paragraph — or it is not.
Every site tells robots what they may read, in a small public file placed at its root. Our own measurement: on 20 October 2026 we read that file on six French technical distribution sites, then one product page on each — one at a time, one request per second, with a reader that identifies itself and gives a contact address, and respecting what the file allows. Across the six, not one names a single of the ten automated readers we tested. The decision has not been made: it has been made by default, and by default access is open.
What a machine finds on a product page
A product page carries text for the buyer, and sometimes a block of data placed in the page for machines, written in a vocabulary search engines agreed to read — it is called schema.org, and that is the word to give your web agency. That block decides whether your price is a number or a picture.
Our own measurement: five pages read on 20 October 2026, one per site, picked without sorting — the first one in each shop’s site map. Five dated cases read with the same instrument, not five cases representative of the market.
| What the machine looks for | Pages where it finds it |
|---|---|
| a block of product data in the page | 5 of 5 |
| the price, with its currency | 5 of 5 |
| availability: in stock, sold out, on back order | 5 of 5 |
| the reference in a field of its own | 4 of 5 |
That is better than we expected: the essential work is already done, most often by the merchant platform.
What it does not find, and nothing tells it so
On these five pages the reference never appears in the product name: it lives in its field, or nowhere. And on the fifth, the one without that field, the product name is the reference — eight characters, with not one word of description.
That page therefore gives a reference and no description; the other four, were the field to go missing, would give the opposite. Nothing in the page says which of the two the machine received. A buyer sees the difference at a glance; a machine answers with what it has, and it answers all the same.
Your trade-account prices, your minimum quantities, your lead times: not looked for, so not measured. A machine will only get them if the page carries them.
What an assistant can ask for
We opened our own catalogue tools to an assistant. Our own measurement: surface read on 20 October 2026 in their code, version 0.1.2. It has three requests: the list of your catalogues, a search, the contents of one aisle. For each product it receives the fields of the page, the price, the stock, and the reason that product is there — at most eight elements of the request that matched.
What it does not get: the rest of the list, the count of values available to narrow down, the exclusion of out-of-stock items, and above all the list of your fields with their exact values. Our engine accepts seventeen settings on a search; the assistant passes three. And it does not order: it shows, it does not sell. The detail is in the article written for whoever connects the tool.
Four moves, and none costs a euro of advertising
The reference in a field of its own. Measured above: anywhere else, it is not there.
The price with its currency, in the same block. A price inside a picture does not exist for this reader.
Availability declared. All five pages already do it.
One page per reference, reachable without a filter. With no address of its own, no answer can point to it. These four moves are done once, and they are not renewed every month like a bid.
Why this page does not answer its own title
We have not measured what an answer engine says about your products today, and we will not write it. The first reason is enough: an answer is not reproducible. The same question asked twice does not return the same text, so a screenshot proves nothing about tomorrow. The second: our rule for reading a third-party site requires an identified reader, which a conversational interface behind an account does not allow.
Whoever shows you today what an AI says about your products is showing you one draw. What is stable, and what is yours, is what the page gives to read — the rule we hold ourselves to on our own measurement page.