We ran a small Canadian lip gloss brand’s products through Shopify Catalog, the product feed Shopify shares with ChatGPT, Copilot and other AI assistants, searching as a Canadian shopper. The results split cleanly in two.
Type the exact name of one of its products and it came up first, every time. Type what a new customer would type, like “non sticky lip gloss” or “vegan lip gloss”, and it wasn’t in the top 10. Not once.
Here’s what that tells you, and what it doesn’t.
The results, side by side
| What the shopper typed | Searches | Brand in the top 10 |
|---|---|---|
| A product’s exact name plus “lip gloss” | 3 (two glosses and a gift box) | 3 of 3, each at #1 |
| The brand name plus “lip gloss” | 1 | 0 of 1 |
| Everyday searches, like “vegan lip gloss”, “non sticky high shine lip gloss” or “lip gloss gift set” | 9 | 0 of 9 |
Each search had a few hundred catalog results to choose from, and we read the top 10. We checked the glosses on October 27, 2026 and the gift box on October 28.
Being found by name is the easy part
A shopper who types your exact product name already knows you. Maybe she saw you on Instagram, or a friend handed her the tube. Coming up first for that search is good news, but it’s housekeeping. It means the product is in Shopify’s catalog, the record is readable and nothing is badly broken.
It doesn’t mean an assistant will suggest you to someone who’s never heard of you. That happens in the everyday searches, and that’s where this brand was missing.
The brand search missed, and the likely reason is fixable
The brand name plus “lip gloss” should be the next-easiest search. It didn’t find the brand at all.
In the catalog, the store’s seller name was its brand written as one all-caps word, and the record had no separate brand field. So a search for the brand typed the normal way, with spaces, had nothing clean to connect to. With no location set, the top spot went to another brand’s gloss whose name happened to share two words with it.
Shopify says AI platforms consider a product’s vendor, along with its title, type, tags and more. So the first check costs nothing: is your vendor field your brand, spelled the way customers type it?
The words were there, and the shelf still went elsewhere
This is the part we found most useful. The brand’s records weren’t thin. Its clear gloss’s description listed the shade, the finish, “non-sticky”, the size, six key ingredients and “Vegan and cruelty-free”.
It still wasn’t in the top 10 for “non sticky lip gloss” or “vegan lip gloss”, each with more than 350 results. Having the shopper’s word in your description wasn’t enough to make the first page.
So what did the listings that made it look like? Across the nine everyday searches, 90 spots in all, two things stood out:
- Every title said what the product was. All 90 had “gloss”, “lip” or a close product word (glaze, balm, tint, oil) in the title. The brand’s titles were just product names.
- Most had far more reviews, often hundreds or thousands. Most, not all. A two-gloss set with a single review came 3rd for “vegan lip gloss duo”, and its title spelled out vegan, lip gloss and duo. The brand’s gift box also had one review, and its title was just its name.
One snapshot can’t tell you which of those things decided it. Titles, reviews, brand size and things we can’t see all get mixed together. What it can tell you is which checks are cheap, and titles are the cheapest.
One record arrived half empty
The gift box had a quieter problem. On October 28, Shopify’s catalog had a blank product description for it, while the full text sat only on the variant. Anything reading the product-level description saw nothing.
When we looked again on November 4, the description was coming through. If you sell bundles or gift sets, look up the set’s own record, not just the singles. Shopify’s Channel mapping page lets you choose where the catalog takes the title and description from.
What to check in your own store
Run these as a shopper in the country you sell to:
- Your exact product name. It should come up first. If it doesn’t, find out whether the product is in the catalog at all before anything else. Our guide to products not showing in ChatGPT covers that.
- Your brand name plus the product type. If you’re missing, check your vendor field and how your store name is written.
- Your titles. Do they say what the product is? “[Name] Clear Shimmer Lip Gloss, 10 mL” beats “[Name]”. The beauty product data guide covers the rest of the record.
- Three to five everyday searches your customers really type. Note who’s in the top 10, and what their titles and descriptions say that yours don’t. Build that list from real customer questions, not guesses.
- Any bundle or gift set. Make sure its own description arrives, not just its variant’s.
Our AI visibility audit turns what you find into one fix with an owner and a date.
A week later
We ran some of these searches again on November 4, 2026. Each product still came up first for its exact name, and now for a US shopper as well. The country comparison tells that part. The brand search, “non sticky lip gloss” and “vegan lip gloss” still didn’t find the brand in either country.
How we checked
On October 27 and 28, 2026, we searched Shopify’s catalog with the shopper’s country set to Canada and saved the top 10 for each search: three exact-name searches, one brand search and nine everyday searches. We also ran the brand search with no location set. We identified the brand’s listings by their seller record and read each listing’s title, description, Shopify’s generated lists, rating and price. On November 4 we repeated six of the searches as a Canadian and as a US shopper.
Your next step
This week, run three searches for your best seller: its exact name, your brand name with the product type, and the everyday phrase your customers use most. If the brand search misses, fix the vendor field first. It’s the cheapest fix on the list.