Sixthshop

I’ve been building Shopify apps solo for about a year.

Two months ago, I started working on a new app focused on something pretty new: helping stores show up in AI answers (like ChatGPT and Gemini).

No big launch. No audience. Just shipping and figuring things out as I go.

Here’s what the last 60 days actually looked like — the good, the bad, and the confusing.

📊 The numbers

• Started: 0 merchants

• Now: 30 merchants

• Revenue: $0 (free for now)

• Reviews: 0

The “0 reviews” part turned out to be way more important than I expected.

🔍 What I learned from Shopify App Store SEO (ASO)

I did a full keyword audit:

• Checked 38 keywords

• Tracked ranking, competition, and top apps

Result: I ranked on page 1 for only 4/38 keywords.

A few examples:

• “AI SEO” (~2,800 apps) → #18

• “agentic storefronts” (~376 apps) → #12 (low competition, interesting space)

• “AI visibility” (~2,300 apps) → #29

• “JSON” (in my app name) → not even page 1

That last one surprised me the most.

The pattern was obvious:
Apps with 10+ reviews consistently outrank apps with 0 reviews — even if your listing is better.

So ASO isn’t just keywords.
👉 It’s keywords × reviews.

I also realized some of my search terms were useless.
Switched all 5 to more “blue ocean” keywords with weaker competition.

🚫 Getting banned from Reddit & Shopify Community

I tried doing what most devs do early on:

• Answer questions

• Mention my app when relevant

Got flagged and banned from both.

Lesson learned the hard way:

👉 These platforms reward helpful people, not subtle promoters.

What actually works (from observing others):

• Give genuinely useful answers

• Go deep, not generic

• Don’t mention your app unless directly asked

• Let your profile do the selling

⭐ The review problem nobody talks about

This is the hardest part so far.

• 30 merchants installed

• Some are actively using it

• Sent ~20 review requests

• Added in-app prompts

• Even personalized emails

Result: 0 reviews

It’s honestly frustrating.

Next experiment:
I’m planning to send short Loom videos to my top users.

From what I’ve read:

• Email asks convert ~2–3%

• Personal videos can hit 30–40%

Let’s see.

If anyone has cracked the “first 5 reviews” problem organically, I’d love to hear how.

👻 30–40% of installs never open the app

This one surprised me too.

Roughly a third of installs:

• Complete install

• Then never open the app

No idea why.

Could be:

• Shopify behavior (install multiple, try few)

• Weak onboarding

• Wrong expectations

For now, I’m focusing on active users instead of chasing inactive ones.

🔜 What I’m doing next

1. Getting first 5–10 reviews (highest leverage)

2. Building SEO pages around queries like
   → “how to get your store recommended by ChatGPT”

3. Trying cold outreach:

   • Find stores not appearing in AI answers

   • Show them proof

   • Reach out with that insight

🧠 My takeaways after 60 days

• Shopify ASO is underrated

• Reviews are the real bottleneck early on

• Community marketing works — if you don’t act like a marketer

• 1:1 outreach > bulk messages (at this stage)

Still figuring things out, sharing as I go.

Happy to answer anything — especially if you’re building in the Shopify ecosystem.

We’ve all seen the "Search with ChatGPT" and Google AI Overviews taking over. But for most small Shopify stores, their products are completely invisible to these models.

I spent the last month running "AI Readiness Audits" on 50 SMB Shopify stores through my project, Sixthshop. I wanted to know: Why does an AI recommend a big-box retailer over a high-quality niche brand?

The "AI Discovery" Gap

It turns out, traditional SEO (keywords, backlinks) isn't enough for LLM-based shopping. AI assistants look for Confidence Signals.

Here are the 3 biggest killers of AI Visibility I found:

1. Schema Fragmentation: 85% of the stores had valid Google Schema, but lacked the shippingDetails and hasMerchantReturnPolicy blocks that AI agents require to "guarantee" a product's eligibility to a user.

2. Lack of Intent-Mapping: Product descriptions were written for humans, but lacked "Attribute-Dense" summaries that LLMs use to map a product to a complex query (e.g., "best breathable linen for hot climates").

3. The "Knowledge Gap": Most stores don't have a structured FAQ that answers "Serviceability" questions, which causes the AI to hallucinate or skip the store entirely out of caution.

The Result

We took one store and fixed these technical "AI signals." Within 90 days, their AI Readiness Score jumped, and they started appearing as a "Top Recommendation" in ChatGPT for their niche.

I’m curious for those of you running e-com or building in the Shopify space, are you seeing any referral traffic from chatgpt.com or google.com/search/ai yet?

Check out the full breakdown and the audit tool here: https://www.sixthshop.com

#Shopify #AI #SEO #BuildInPublic #Ecommerce

I've been noticing something: more people are asking ChatGPT or Copilot what to buy instead of starting with a Google search. At first, I thought this was just a novelty. But then I started testing it myself.

I'd ask AI tools to recommend products across different categories skincare, headphones, camping gear, you name it. The recommendations were... fine. But here's what bothered me: a lot of genuinely great products I knew about weren't showing up. Not because they were inferior, but because the AI simply couldn't parse their product information properly.

That gap kept nagging at me. Sellers spend so much time optimizing for Google SEO and running ads, but there's basically nothing telling them: "Hey, can AI even understand your product catalog?" That's the question I'm trying to answer with Sixthshop.

I'm still figuring this out, honestly. I'm exploring how these AI shopping assistants actually work under the hood what signals they prioritize, what makes a product "AI-readable," how merchants can position themselves for this shift without rewriting everything from scratch.

Some days I think I'm onto something. Other days I wonder if I'm just chasing a pattern that'll look obvious in hindsight. But the more I dig, the more I see this isn't going away. Discovery is changing.

If you're seeing similar shifts in how people shop, or you're experimenting with AI-driven commerce yourself, I'd genuinely love to compare notes.

Still learning, still testing.