Retail AI Citation Study: 29925 AI Answers Measured

The short answer

In Retail, 29925 AI answers were measured between May 2026 and August 2026. The most cited platform is Shopify at 5.27%, ahead of YouTube at 4.12%. That ranking differs from the general one: Shopify is cited 5.8 times more here than in the general ranking.

In retail the general ranking is wrong: the platform that leads here is the one merchants publish on, not the one everyone optimises for.

Key figures

• 301025 AI answers analysed between August 2025 and August 2026
• 1820738 citations extracted from those answers
• 131349 distinct domains cited at least once
• 5 models measured separately: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Grok
• 79% of the questions asked in French, the rest in English

Which platforms the AIs cite in Retail

• Shopify: 5.27%
• YouTube: 4.12%
• Trustpilot: 3.55%
• Reddit: 2.23%
• Amazon: 2.17%
• Wikipedia: 2.04%
• Facebook: 1.03%
• Instagram: 0.48%
• Microsoft: 0.37%
• Apple: 0.34%

What this sector cites more than the average

• Shopify: 5.27% here against 0.91% in the general ranking, 5.8 times more
• Amazon: 2.17% here against 1.12% in the general ranking, 1.9 times more
• YouTube: 4.12% here against 2.35% in the general ranking, 1.8 times more
• Reddit: 2.23% here against 1.48% in the general ranking, 1.5 times more
• Trustpilot: 3.55% here against 2.7% in the general ranking, 1.3 times more

The leading source model by model

• ChatGPT: Shopify at 5.48%
• Gemini: Shopify at 9.3%
• Perplexity: YouTube at 5.37%
• Claude: Trustpilot at 1.41%
• Grok: Facebook at 8.79%

How to read these numbers

A citation rate of 2% means the source was cited twice for every 100 measured answers. Rates are computed per model against the number of answers of that model, so a model with a smaller sample never distorts a column. A source cited several times inside one answer is counted once per company block, which keeps a single verbose answer from dominating a month.

The distribution is worth as much as the ranking. The top three sources hold 60% of the citations counted in this table, 7 platforms sit above 1%, and Shopify is cited 1.3 times more often than YouTube. A market where three sources hold most of the citations rewards depth on those three rather than presence everywhere.

This sector was measured on 29925 answers, 80.7% of them in French, across all five models (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Grok). The language mix matters when you read the ranking, because local platforms weigh more in French speaking markets.

What changed over the measured period

This sector was measured over 4 months, between May 2026 and August 2026, on 29925 answers, and 31 platforms recorded at least one citation. Its leading source, Shopify, fell from 14.8% in May 2026 to 2.87% in August 2026, which is the kind of movement that makes a ranking older than one quarter unreliable.

Shopify month by month in this sector

• May 2026: 14.8%
• June 2026: 4.83%
• July 2026: 4.72%
• August 2026: 2.87%

What this means in practice

Retail is the sector where independent storefronts hold their own against marketplaces. Store pages, review profiles and video reviews carry most of the citations, and encyclopedic sources fall behind. For a merchant, this is good news: the page you control can be the source, provided it carries the specifications, the price and the availability in text. The models compare products, and they can only compare what is written on the page.

How to use this study

1. Write product pages that answer a comparison question completely, with specifications, price and stock visible in text.
2. Keep a public review profile active, because it appears alongside store pages in the same answers.
3. Check that your collection pages are crawlable and not rendered only in the browser.

How this study was measured

1. We run a panel of buyer questions every month, the questions people type before choosing a supplier.
2. Every question is sent to five AI: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Grok.
3. Every answer is parsed, every cited source is extracted and normalised to a domain and a platform.
4. The citation rate is the number of citations of a source per 100 measured answers, computed per model so an uneven number of answers per model never distorts a column.
5. The month is closed, the dataset is rebuilt, and the public files are republished on data.sorank.com.

Limits of this study

1. This panel is not a neutral sample of the web. The questions come from the sectors our users operate in.
2. The panel leans French: 237930 answers come from questions asked in French and 63095 from questions asked in English.
3. Model coverage is uneven: 87008 answers from ChatGPT, 87004 from Perplexity, 87000 from Gemini, 20011 from Claude and 20002 from Grok. The two smallest samples are read as direction rather than as precise values.
4. A citation is not a click. This study measures what the AIs cite, not what a reader does next.

The dataset behind this study

Every number on this page comes from the public Sorank dataset. The underlying figures, the monthly detail and the filters are available here:

Open the source data on data.sorank.com

Data updated on 2026-08-26.

How to cite this study

This study is free to quote, in an article, a deck or a report. Please cite the source and the measurement period, because the numbers move every month.

Sorank (2026). Retail AI Citation Study: 29925 AI Answers Measured. Sorank GEO studies, measured on 301025 AI answers collected between August 2025 and August 2026. Available at https://www.sorank.com/data/retail-ai-citation-study

Related studies

The same panel, read from another angle:

• AI Citation Study: Which Platforms the AIs Cite Most
• Shopify AI Citation Study
• Directories in AI Answers: Data Study
• All GEO studies

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