Transcription
Right now, someone is opening ChatGPT and typing best linen pants for hot humid weather under $150. ChatGPT pulls up three brands, recommends one, and the person buys without ever opening Google. Now, the part that should scare you, it's almost never your brand.
900 million people are using ChatGPT every single week. Perplexity, Google AI mode, Microsoft Copilot, all of them now sell products directly inside of the chat. They're really projecting AI-driven commerce to hit 3 to 5 trillion by 2030. And the brands that I think will win for the next 18 months are going to lock out everyone who just waits it out.
So, today I'm going to show you exactly why most clothing brands are completely invisible inside of these AI tools, and a few things that you can do and change this week to fix this for your future. What's up? My name is Christian. Here at The Brand Energy, we are a Shopify-focused agency. We've built and audited over 200 clothing stores, and we run our OSO program, which is the Optimize for Owner program, with over 300 Shopify clothing brand owners inside of it. Uh we get a lot of front-row action of what's actually working in this category right now, and AI shopping is the single biggest distribution shift since I think paid social broke in 2014. Um so, let's get into this.
Now, before we talk about the fix, you have to understand what has changed. For over 20 years, the buying journey for a clothing brand looked the same. Someone Googles linen pants for travel, they scroll through 10 blue links, click on four different stores, they compare, maybe buy. I think SEO definitely controlled the funnel, right? Paid social filled that top, and email pulled the bottom. That funnel is collapsing, and here is what it actually looks like now.
ChatGPT instant checkout went live in September, I think of 2025, and you can buy products directly inside of ChatGPT app. There's no clicking out, going to a website, there's no browser, none of that. Perplexity also launched its own shopping experience with instant buy. It's powered by PayPal. And Google rolled out AI mode with a Gen-Z storefront. So, Shopify is the underlying catalog for both Google, OpenAI's protocols, Microsoft Copilot is in the mix, too.
So, now the buying journey looks a little bit something like this. Shopper types a question. AI gives them three options. They pick one. They check out inside of the chat. Five touchpoints just got compressed into one. And the wild part from research that's coming out now, it's that for clothing brands specifically, AI-referred shoppers tend to spend more, which is amazing. So, Perplexity reported that their shoppers have a 57% higher AOV, higher intent, less price comparison, faster decision-making. This isn't necessarily a future thing, right? This is actually happening today. And most clothing brand owners haven't even checked if they're even showing up on these AI platforms.
So, why are clothing brands I think disproportionately invisible compared to say like electronics or maybe even skin care? I think there's three reasons. Number one, AI doesn't see product photos. And I think a lot of people tend to rely heavily on product photography. Um what it does is it actually reads text. Like your gorgeous flat lays, your editorial campaign shots, your 4K product video, like none of that's really going to help you here when ChatGPT or Perplexity is trying to answer linen pants for hot weather, breathable, true-to-size, it's actually matching against the text on your product page, your reviews, your schema, and your external mentions of your brand. So, what does most clothing brand copy actually say? They say something like this, "Crafted from premium fabric, effortless silhouette, designed for the modern woman." Right? Like, that tells the AI literally nothing, right? There's no fabric weight, no fit notes, no use case, no comparison. So, the AI is skips you and cites a Reddit thread maybe from 2019 instead.
Now, reason number two is your product data is incomplete in ways that matter to machines, not necessarily humans, but AI shopping platforms, they pull structured product data, name, description, SKU, GTIN, brand, materials, color, size, price, availability, reviews. Most Shopify clothing stores have product titles, maybe some descriptions that are okay and prices, right? They don't have fiber composition, they don't have country of origin, weight, and actual grams, the fit type, proper schema markup in the back end. So, again, the AI cannot find your products even if they're perfect match for what the person is searching.
And reason number three is you don't have an LLMS.txt files. Um the this new LLMS.txt is a brand new file that sits at the root of your store. This so this will be your store.com/llms.txt. And think of it as a I would say a tour guide for AI, right? Where the if you remember if you've ever done SEO, the robots.txt, they tell search engines what they're allowed to crawl. LLMS.txt tells AI models which pages of your store actually matter, your best products, your size guide, your shop your actual policies, your brand story. Without it, AI is essentially guessing, which it can do a pretty good job, but why not give it the framework, right, of what it actually needs?
Now, I'll say this, uh the recording of this video, May 2026, Shopify has quietly started to roll out native LLMs.txt files for stores in the background. So, you might already have one on your store, but we'll talk about that here in a second.
All right, so first off, what we need to do is just make sure that we have turned on a gen tech storefronts in your Shopify admin. Shopify launched a gen tech storefronts in December of this last year. It's a single toggle and it syndicates your product catalog to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot. You're going to be the merchant of record, so every order technically flows through the Shopify admin with full attribution, so you can actually turn individual AI channels on and off. So, let's get into it so I can show you what this looks like right now.
All right, so now Shopify has updated this. So, if you [clears throat] go to your sales channels, you will see in here a gen tech. If you click on that, this will give you kind of like the rundown of what needs to be active. By default, for a lot of you, this will probably already be active. But, you just want to make sure that yeah, this right here, a gen tech storefronts are active. If not, there may be some things that you'll need to do in here. So, this will kind of walk you through some of the things that you may have to do. So, there may be some policies that you may need to update, and then you just have got to make sure that your products are synced. But again, for majority of you, I'd say 90% of you, these things should be in place already. Um, and then if it's not, a lot of times there's kind of turn this on and it's really just a couple of clicks and you're good to go.
This does give you some additional info here on recent searches where, you know, people search this on maybe ChatGPT and our products actually showed up. And it tells you like the exact sort of keywords that they were using in order for these products to show, which is pretty cool. Um, and then relevant searches in media, and this also allows you to switch it up to services or software. Again, just more keywords and this would be something that I would say you can take a look at some of these things in here. Kind of come back here often and see [clears throat] like if it's already working then it's almost like a doubling down, right?
I think the one of the last things I will talk about is creating more content, right? For these AI platforms and if your product, you know, your actual product page, you know, has these keywords, amazing. Let's actually write a a blog post about it, right? Let's let's write it some FAQs on on that product page that go, you know, include these keywords. The more that you can include some of those keywords throughout the website, the better. But you want to do it in a helpful way. You're actually adding content that's relevant to what people may be actually searching for and this will help you kind of rank a little bit better, a little bit faster. Um So yeah, this is actually now it's it's a pretty straightforward thing. In the future you will see more AI platforms show up in here. As of right now, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot are are the two that show up in [clears throat] here. They did add Shop cuz Shop does have a say an AI component to it. If you do go go to things at shop.app on the browser, you can actually look for Shopify products [clears throat] and they do have a some kind of AI platform that can show [clears throat] you, you products if people are searching for those right keywords. >> [clears throat] >> Um but again, this will be, yeah, pretty pretty straightforward. You don't mean you don't have to do anything at all, but at least you know, you'll see it everything here under Agentic and my guess is that this will probably change through time. They will give us some better tools and things to rank better, faster with some of these AI platforms.
>> Now, the second thing that we're going to fix is we're going to audit and customize your llms.txt file. Now, if again, if you want to know if your store right now has this, again, go to your store.com, whatever your URL is, /llms.txt. Hit send and you should see a markdown file with links to your store. Like I said, Shopify is rolling these out natively to stores in the background. So, most of you will probably have one set up. Now, this will be a very default version. So, it's going to be very generic. So, it might include some store metadata, you know, phone number, name of the store, things like that, and links to maybe some product product listings or some very basic agent instructions. But, it has no idea what your hero products are, which collections drive the most revenue, or what your brand story actually is. So, you kind of have to take over.
I think a good llms.txt for a clothing brand should include the following. One, it's going to be going to be one or two sentence brand description. The AI will often pull this verbatim when introducing your brand. So, definitely want to make sure that that sounds like you and your brand. I would want to see links to five to 10 of your best-selling products with just short, attribute-rich descriptions, links to your top collections. For example, linen pants, modest swim, petite edit, right? Name in a way that customers could actually search, and then links to size guide, shipping policy, return policy. These answered the questions that AI gets asked the most about clothing. And obviously, we also want some link to either about or meet the founders, a page that talks about your brand.
So, let me show you how to get these edits done on your llms.txt file. Now, like I said, if you go to a browser and you type in your URL and then put /llms.txt, you will get this file. This file right now, Shopify is automatically generating it and it has all the information or sort of like instructions, right? That AI agents need to know about your store. Now, if we look at this though, this is very, very generic. And honestly, even reading this now compared to a couple weeks ago is actually completely different. So, they're definitely making adjustments into this this file right here. The thing that I would say it's it's missing right now would be just a little bit more context into your store, who you are, maybe some of your best selling products, etc., etc. Just to kind of tip it into some of the the things that you want it to pay attention to.
Something very easy that I just did and you can do this too. You can actually copy this whole thing, throw it into Claude and ask it to to fix it essentially, to add the recommended things that it thinks it's missing and it will give you a nice little synopsis of who Bid Branding is for us for example, specifically what we're selling and obviously with the ability for you to kind of fill in the gaps of any other additional products that you want to make sure that it knows. Supported customers, basically who is it who's our, you know, target audience, customer support, putting that information in here, again, just super important. And then it kind of goes into the normal, you know, doc with all the information and everything that Shopify already already fulfills.
So, I'm going to also take note in here and we kind of talked about it in the previous step is these AI platforms are reading your policies. So, I think making sure that your policies are up-to-date and that you have all the accurate information on your policies is going to be super, super important because they will be reading all of your policies. So, make sure that you have those set up. And for some of you, I know that some of you like to do policies as like pages. So, if you have policies that you've added as a page, like a refund policy or a shipping policy and you have it as a page, it may not be able to read that. So, my suggestion is making sure that you go to settings and then you go to policies and then you actually set them up in here. As you can see, like we need that that shipping policy and this legal notice both of them actually set up in order for this to be fully complete. But, these are the ones that AI platforms are going to read, not the ones that you have under your pages. Very, very important.
Anyway, so after this is done, like there's a couple things. You can technically grab all this, um save it as a file and then you can open up Claude in your desktop, open up Claude code, and then just have Claude code add this into your store. Now, if you want to do this yourself, you can, too. So, you can copy all this and what Claude code is essentially going to do for you is it's going to go to your to your code editor. If we go here to edit code on your current theme, and it's just going to add a new file called llms.txt.liquid and that will kind of essentially override your current llms file. So, let me just see here. I believe it would be under Let me see. They're under assets or templates. Let me just see. Okay, yeah, not templates. Actually, let me see here. Yeah, let's let's test that real quick here under if we go to templates and then we just add a new page. We call it LL MS.txt.liquid. And then in here, let me just copy all this. Oops. No, just all of this. And then let me go back here. Paste that in here. Let me click save. Okay, so I think that saved. Let's just refresh this. Okay, [clears throat] and yeah, that worked. There we go. So now it has bit branding, da da da, and all the information that we just added. Obviously, we still need to go in here and fix a couple of these things just to make sure that we have the correct information. Um, but then that's yeah, that's that's good to go. We have an updated file.
Now, what I would say about this is because Shopify will probably update that LLM LLMS file. That may be [clears throat] something where you'll kind of have to just pay attention um, to when they update that because now we have kind of like a static version of it in here that we will have to go in and update ourselves versus the original version of it um, that was Shopify essentially taking care of it, but it was again a very generic template. So um, that generic template though could change through time as things are changing and things are changing very rapidly I would say. So if you want to maybe just stick with the generic version, you can. Um, but I think this will give you a little bit more of a customized version um of that. Now, if we [clears throat] delete these then this will kind of revert back to um, the default one that we have in here. So that will be an easy way for you to kind of check this. So this may be something where if you do have that new version, um, you go in, you kind of delete it. Maybe this at this rate I would say once a month um, just to double check and make sure that there's nothing new that they have added um, as part of uh, this this doc moving forward. But again, we just did that manually, but with Claude and Claude code, you can technically ask it to make the changes for you. And if you haven't checked out that, we have a couple videos on connecting Claude code to Shopify. It is very easy. Once you have it connected, you just ask it to do these things. You may have to accept permissions a couple times, but it will do these things for you.
All [snorts] right, so the third thing that I want you to do to make sure that you're visible to AI agents is going to be rewriting product descriptions to match how people actually shop in a conversation. I think to me this is the single biggest lever, right? A lot of the things that we talked about so far are somewhat, you know, pretty straightforward and honestly, they may even get better through time or you may not even have to do these things. But the thing that you do have full control over is how you're describing your products. Instead of writing copy like a fashion magazine like you need to write copy like the answer to an actual customer question.
So, I want you to stop doing things like this like crafted from premium linen. The Avery pant features an effortless silhouette and a relaxed leg perfect for elevating your warm weather wardrobe, right? Instead, I want you to write something more like this. Lightweight 100% European linen pants, 180 GSM, designed for hot human weather, wide leg 28 inch inseam, sizes extra small through 3XL. They run true to size. If you're between sizes, our customers typically size down. Machine washable, gets softer with every wash. It's best for travel, beach days, indoor offices with strong AC. Right? The first version tells AI absolutely nothing. There's no details in there. Now, the second version, I think it's a direct match for at least six common conversational shopping questions, right? So, what you want to do really is build a template for every product description.
Now, let's get into this and I'm going to show you just a little trick on how you can do this with actually with Claude. Um just very quick. All right, so for a lot of these product descriptions, um what I really want you to do is kind of copy them, put them on on Claude and ask it to rewrite it for AI platforms. And um if you want, you can actually copy this right here. Um I'll put it in the description of um of the video. Um but this right here is just a very simple like, "Hey, considering these instructions, right?" Um which is like writing some descriptions so that it can answer uh it's like you want to answer customer questions, right? In a way that AI can read it very easily. Um but it was still would work for for your customers. Um so, considering these instructions, I basically said, "Fix this product description," which I just kind of pasted in here. Um and then it came up with with this right here. So, um it's a little bit I would say longer, but it just it pairs up the actual detail, right? So, it's like boxy and oversized by design. Um but it didn't it gives you some additional things that um go beyond just kind of listing the benefits or the details of the product. So, I think this is going to be helpful for those people who that they want to read and they want all the information, right? Um but then you I think you want a combination right up. Like this is going to be your main product description. So, this right here is written in a way that is very easy to to get for again, normal people, but AI uh platforms and agents will be able to also read this just very easily and be able to tell and give customers the information that they need about the actual product. So, you need to be answering these things. Like, what is the the garment made out of? How is the fit, the construction? What is it best for? How do you care for this item? All these little things are going to be very, very important. And actually describing the product is also going to be very, very important as well. So, what I would recommend is, yeah, doing copying this and replacing your actual description. But then, I still think this right here, it's just way for, again, those customers who would just want a very quick and easy, kind of quick and dirty, way of knowing what the product is made out of and all the like and the bullet points is just so scannable and easy to read. So, I think this still deserves a a not a category, but a product meta field. So, something that you can add here as an as an additional field and then on the actual front end of the theme, you can have a maybe a little drop down in here that has the details and then it goes into those bullet points. And that way you'll have best of both worlds. You'll have the description that may be more paragraph based and then you have a details nice little block hidden in here with those those bullet points. Again, it's almost the same information just kind of displayed and written just a slightly different. One more for AI platforms, the other may be more for people who are trying to just scan quickly and get the information that they need about the product.
Let me say this is a a very manual process. So, this is again one of those things where my recommendation would be get yourself the Claude desktop app. Make sure that you're connecting it to Shopify and then asking it to do this at scale for all of your products. You can do this with Claude code. Again, if you haven't checked out the video, I would suggest you check out the video on how to connect them and how to start communicating so I can actually make these changes for you.
The next thing is going to be adding product schema and FAQ schema to every product page. I think this is a little bit more technical, but let me explain a couple things. I think the the the first thing is that the JSON-LD schema markup is just a lot of a lot of fancy words in there. Uh it's really think of it as a sort of like hidden text that tells AI exactly what your page is in a language that machines can actually read. So, for clothing your product needs product schema at a minimum, right? Name, brand, description, image, SKU, color, size, material, all those things. And then you also want FAQ schema. So, you want to pull three to five most common pre-purchase questions that you get on each product. Does this run small? What's the fabric weight? Is it see-through? Right? And answer them in the FAQ schema. Pages with FAQ schemas are 3.2 times more likely to appear in AI overview. And I'll say most Shopify themes right now as of recording this video don't include this out of the box. So, we'll need an app for that, but let me show you how we can do that.
All right. So, for the JSON-LD schema markup my recommendation [clears throat] would be to do some kind of app that will with a few clicks literally be able to add a lot of these things. And honestly this one is maybe even overkill if you already have something with SEO um in terms of apps that are just you know just fixing in the background. Because this app has a lot of extra features and a lot of extra things, not just the schema, but the schema is one of the the top things that they have in here. And actually this is a good example of um some of the what we consider schema. Right? So, for example, someone on Google is searching for special shoes and kind of like nothing shows up versus um now you search special shoes and now you have you know the store name. That's like one piece of schema or kind of like a if you if you think of it like a tag, right? You have breadcrumbs, which is like your home, your products, and then the actual product, the [clears throat] title of the product, the description, whether it's stock, whether it has reviews, how does delivery returns work, the actual image of the product. These are all sort of like individual fields. And sometimes the these AI platforms or even search engines, they also use schema in order to tell what is what from all the information that's provided in the back end of the store. So, think of it as a kind of like an extra tag or an extra field that really tells the platform this is the vendor, this is price, you know, and it kind of goes a little bit more deeper into some other things as well. But I would say, yeah, an app is really going to be your best bet in this in this case. I just found this one. This one had a bunch of great reviews. And again, it does have a lot more things in here than just the schema, but it's a great place to start fixing a lot of the issues that you may see in the back end for your products.
And then more I think differently to than than that is the ability to have a the FAQs, right? So, Shopify does have a free app called Shopify knowledge base. And this allows you to answer all the questions in the back end and give answers very quickly to AI agents that are coming into your store. So, an AI agent comes in and [snorts] they want to know what languages is your store available in instead of looking in other places and other pages of your store, you can just give it the answer very straightforward in here in a very easy way. This will also, once you install this app, this will give you some actual questions that people may be asking about your brand. Um so you may have some things in here in the query log of what actual people are are actually asking AI. So maybe some people are going to ChatGPT and asking things about your brand. Um you will see some of those questions in here cuz maybe the AI agents don't have the answers to. Now, you will also see unanswered questions, which again, I would highly suggest to kind of go through these and answer them and kind of sporadically come back in over here. Um and just make sure that you're answering um a lot of these questions. Again, think of this as this is like the first place that the AI agent will look in order to answer some of these questions. And some of these you may think are redundant or you already um have you already have that information somewhere in a page or an about page or in a policy page. But again, just responding to the question in here in a very easy, succinct way, it's just a great way to make sure that whatever the AI agent is telling your customers is what you want it to tell them, not something that is kind of hallucinating uh or making up uh from from your brand or from different pages um that are in the back end of your store.
All right, so lastly, I would say this is this is more of the the long game, but I do think it compounds just as with SEO. AI tends to site comparison content, best of lists, and category guides. So, those are three big things, and your blog, and I'm saying your blog because you should have a blog on your store. Um your blog should have at least one piece of every major use case that you serve. So, best linen pants for travel, easy. Best modest swimsuits for moms, linen versus cotton for hot weather. And all these ideas could be needs to be written from your perspective, right, as the expert, including your products LinkedIn there. Honestly, like even alongside maybe some competitors in there, too.
So, if you don't have a blog, or maybe you do have a blog, and you need a little bit of help on what's the process for doing this correctly, let me show you just a very quick and easy method to get this done. Shopify actually gives you a blog out of the gate. So, if you click here on the left-hand side, you go to content, uh you can see blog posts. It's already something that just exists uh for your store. It's just a matter of uh starting to add your blog post, and just add them to the front end of your of your of your store. So, as you can see, we already have a bunch of blog posts in here that we have written. Um but, you can do so by just yeah, clicking here, adding a blog post. And this will be very similar to what you probably seen when you add pages or add new products, right? You have your title, you have the actual content of the blog post. Uh these are some additional ones that we've created, but you have the author, um the actual blog, or just blog section, but you can have multiple blogs. Um you can have one that's like product updates, you can have that's your news, you can have yeah, like we have case studies and a podcast, um all as different actual different blog posts, or different types of blogs, I would say. Uh I think the the terminology here is a little bit different, cuz you have blog and then you have blog post, which is the individual post. Um you can add an image, etc. So, there's you know, all the things that you can do with with any blogs out there. Um and once you have it ready to go, and you have your blog posts in here, um it's just a matter of adding them to the front end of the store. So, again, by default, um Shopify gives you these these even the templates, right? You click here, and you go to you go to blogs, or even the actual individual blog post, um you will see that there is a template in here with the title of the blog post, the actual content of the actual blog post. Um just as they're they're you know uh product templates, collection templates, there's also all these already sort of built out for you. So, um because they're already built out, you may have to, you know, make some adjustments in here. Um but then after that, it's just a matter of adding that to your um to your navigation. So, as you can see, we have right here at the bottom of our on our footer, we have our blog um that is linked right Oops, right there. Um let me see if I can see I don't know if it's this one. Um but we'll click edit so we can see this. Yeah, it is. So, again, under content, menus, this is where if you have a footer menu, you can add blog in here. And as you can see, we just added blog. When you click on that, um you may not have even seen this, but yeah, it's always going to be in here. So, we have our blogs and individual blog posts. Obviously, blog is going to be and for us, it's just our our blog will showcase sort of like everything. Um every single blog post. So, it's going to be the page that um actually like let me just click on it. Um this is the essentially kind of like if if this is our products, this would be like your collection page, right? Where it shows every single um blog post in here. And then you go into the If you like what you see, you kind of read more and then look a little bit deeper um into that particular blog post. Um but again, doing the actual blogs um is is is the hard part, right? It's it's creating the content. Um obviously, using AI can help you tremendously with ideas, with actually writing the content, but at the end of the day, you don't want to just spam your store with a bunch of irrelevant content. You do want information that's going to be helpful for the customer. You always want to write blog posts with that intent in mind. Like, am I writing this just to s- keyword stuff my page or am I writing this because this is actually good, helpful information.
If you are a clothing brand owner and you want this kind of stuff broken down with maybe some templates, audits, some direct help, and PDFs, uh we built the our OSR program exactly for that. It is your membership to Shopify clothing brand owners. If you're interested in joining, there's a link in the description down below.
Now, the one thing that is going to kill most brands AI visibility, even if they do all the steps that we talked about above, is they're treating this like SEO. Like AI doesn't really rank pages, it it just cites sources. Um and I think that's a fundamentally just a different game. In SEO, you're essentially just fighting for like position number one. In AI shopping, there's really no position number one. There's just whether you got mentioned in the answer or you don't get mentioned in the answer. And the signals that drive citation are very different from the signal that drive Google ranking.
Three things that AI weighs more than SEO is consistency of your brand data across the web, your Shopify product data, your Instagram bio, your Google business profile, your Wikipedia mention if you have one. Uh they all need to say the same thing. I think inconsistent data makes AI lose confidence and cite a competitor instead. Also, there's freshness of pricing and availability, right? Outdated data is one of the strongest negative signals. If your Shopify says in stock and your Google shopping feed says out of stock, you definitely going to get dropped from the recommendation. And I think the third thing is going to be third-party mentions. So, if your brand is being talked about on Reddit, on YouTube, on press, on articles, like AI's going to cross-reference multiple sources before recommending you. So, if you're only visible on your own website, that's just a single-source brand, right? And AI's going to deprioritize you. So, the playbook isn't rank for keywords, right? It's more like be the most consistent, complete, and citable source in your category.
There's actually something really cool. Um If If you're interested in seeing how well you're doing with AI visibility on your store, Shopify actually just released this little this little testing tool uh that you can you can just put your URL um and it will run through uh some some some things that you can do or or or need to improve on your actual store. So, I'm going to put that link here in the description down below. But, if you're if you're interested in maybe doing a full audit for your store, not just like the AI portion, just a full audit, uh you should definitely go to our website bitbranding.co. Uh in there, if you click on the shop tab or click on the search, I mean, we have tons of products. Um one of them being a one-on-one call with me um so we can go over through your whole store and any questions that you may have about your store, Shopify, conversion, apps, themes, literally anything. Uh we can definitely help you through that. We'll schedule that call. Uh you come with your questions and we'll get you answers on that call. And as always, if this video was useful, hit that subscribe button, hit that like button, so we get recommended to other people so they can enjoy our content. Uh we'll see you on that next new Shopify video that I'll have for you next week.