
Published June 11, 2025
A simple guide for e-commerce brands in the AI search era
How parts and equipment sellers can adapt their content strategy as AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity change how customers find products.
\n\n### Keyword stuffing is over\n\nTraditional SEO rewarded long‑form pages packed with keyword variations. AI search engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google\'s AI Overviews now lift **short, factual snippets, stats, and first‑hand quotes** directly into their answers. If your brand isn\'t the source of those snippets, you risk disappearing from the millions of users asking product questions to AI daily.\n\n---\n\n### Why AI search optimization matters more for parts & equipment sellers\n\n1. **Customers (both pro and DIY) are turning to AI engines for technical troubleshooting.** Instead of searching Google and clicking through results, buyers now ask ChatGPT questions like "What pump fits a Whirlpool WRS325SDHZ?" or "Is part W10348269 compatible with model ABC?" If your specifications and compatibility data aren\'t structured for AI extraction, you\'re invisible to this growing segment.\n\n2. **Quality troubleshooting content becomes more important.** With conversational AI, customers ask sequential diagnostic questions—starting with *"Why is my prep table compressor hot?"*, then *"How to test a compressor?"*, before finally asking *"What compressor fits model ABC?"*. AI engines surface whoever provides the clearest answer for each question. Competitors with better troubleshooting guides can intercept customers early in their journey and win the eventual parts sale. Traditional SEO-optimized troubleshooting content that stuff keywords into pages\n\n\n---\n\n### 1. Measure your traffic\n\n* Most AI platforms send a traditional ``Referer`` header when a user clicks on a link to your content, so you can monitor traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others in Google Analytics or your preferred analytics tool just like any other referring site.\n* For ChatGPT, every referred URL includes ``?utm_source=chatgpt.com``.\n* Google AI Overview is harder to track directly. When users click source links from the AI summaries, it appears as regular Google search traffic with ``https://www.google.com`` as the referrer.\n* Each session signals *tens* of unseen impressions.\n* Track branded mentions inside AI engines weekly; the delta tells you if you\'re the answer—or the after‑thought.\n\nAll AI search products still use traditional search indexes under the hood. When you ask ChatGPT about a product, it queries Bing\'s index. When Google\'s AI Overview generates an answer, it pulls from the same crawled content that powers regular Google Search results.\n\nThis means **your existing SEO foundation still matters tremendously**. AI models need to first *discover* your content through traditional crawling and indexing before they can cite it in their responses. A well-optimized site structure, clean URLs, proper internal linking, and fast loading times remain critical—they determine whether your content enters the AI\'s source pool at all.\n\nThe key difference is what happens *after* discovery. While traditional search ranked pages by authority and keyword relevance, AI engines now parse that same indexed content for factual snippets, structured data, and authoritative quotes to weave into conversational answers.\n\n| AI Product | Monthly Active Users | Search Engine Used |\n|-----------|-----------------------|--------------------|\n| ChatGPT | 600M+ | Bing |\n| Google Gemini | 400M+ | Google Search (internal) |\n| Google AI Overview | 1.5B+ | Google Search (internal) |\n| Google AI Mode | - | Google Search (internal) |\n| Microsoft Copilot | 30M+ | Bing |\n| Perplexity | 15M+ | Google Search, Bing (also maintains its own indexing/crawling) |\n| Claude | 20M+ | Brave Search |\n| Grok | (not disclosed) | X platform, xAI Live Search |\n| DeepSeek | 100M+ | (not disclosed) |\n| Meta AI | 1B+ | Bing, Google Search |\n| Mistral | 1M+ | Brave Search |\n\n*Note: User numbers are approximate and based on public estimates.*\n\n**AI Product Domains (for analytics filtering):**\n```\nchatgpt.com, gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com, edgeservices.bing.com, perplexity.ai, claude.ai, grok.com, chat.deepseek.com, meta.ai, chat.mistral.ai\n```\n\n### Crawlers\n\nEach platform uses specialized bots with different purposes—some for training models, others for real-time user queries. **Check your `robots.txt` file** to ensure you\'re not accidentally blocking these crawlers, and verify that any `Crawl-delay` directives aren\'t set too high (keep under 10 seconds to avoid hindering discovery).\n\nChatGPT
\n\nOpenAI uses three distinct web crawlers for different purposes:\n\n**OAI-SearchBot** - Used to link and surface websites in ChatGPT\'s search results. This bot is specifically for search functionality and is not used to crawl content for training AI models. To ensure your site appears in search results, allow this bot in your `robots.txt` file.\n\n**ChatGPT-User** - Handles user-initiated actions in ChatGPT and Custom GPTs. When users ask questions, this agent may visit web pages to retrieve current information. This is not used for automatic crawling or AI training.\n\n**GPTBot** - Crawls content that may be used for training OpenAI\'s generative AI foundation models. Disallowing GPTBot signals that your site\'s content should not be used in training generative AI models.\n\nOpenAI publishes IP address ranges for each bot. For detailed crawler management, see [OpenAI\'s official bot documentation](https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots).\n\nPerplexity
\n\nPerplexity uses two distinct crawlers to gather and index information:\n\n**PerplexityBot** - Designed to surface and link websites in search results. To ensure your site appears in Perplexity search results, allow this bot in your ``robots.txt`` file.\n\n**Perplexity-User** - Supports real-time user queries. When users ask questions, this crawler may visit your pages to provide accurate answers and citations. Generally ignores ``robots.txt`` rules since it\'s user-requested.\n\nFor detailed crawler management, see [Perplexity\'s official crawler documentation](https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots).\n\nClaude
\n\nAnthropic uses three distinct crawlers for different purposes:\n\n**ClaudeBot** - Collects web content for AI model training and development. Blocking this bot signals that future site materials should be excluded from training datasets.\n\n**Claude-User** - Supports real-time user queries. When users ask Claude questions, this agent may access websites to retrieve current information. Disabling it prevents content retrieval for user-directed searches.\n\n**Claude-SearchBot** - Analyzes web content to improve search result quality and accuracy. Blocking this reduces your site\'s visibility in Claude\'s search responses.\n\nAll three bots respect standard `robots.txt` directives and support the non-standard `Crawl-delay` extension. For detailed crawler management, see [Anthropic\'s official crawler documentation](https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-data-from-the-web-and-how-can-site-owners-block-the-crawler).\n\n
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\nPublished June 11, 2025
How parts and equipment sellers can adapt their content strategy as AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity change how customers find products.
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