Does KI Score measure products in AI shopping answers?
KI Score measures brands, not individual products. Here is what that means for online shops, retailers, and manufacturers.
Last updated 23 days ago
This article explains what KI Score captures when people ask AI systems about buying products like yours, and what it doesn't. Afterward, you'll know how manufacturers, retailers, and online shops are treated in the measurement and what you can measure today about purchase questions related to your products.
Short answer
No. KI Score measures brands, not individual products. There is no tracking of products, stock-keeping units (SKUs), or product feeds. KI Score also doesn't capture prices or the shopping cards that some AI systems display for purchase questions.
The sidebar does show a Shopping entry under Scoreboard, but it's grayed out, carries the Bald (soon) badge, and doesn't lead to a page yet.
Brands, not products
The KI Score answers one question: how often, and how prominently, do AI systems name your brand in a market, meaning a comparison market made up of one offering and one geographic market? What gets measured is always the brand as a whole, never a specific model or product range.
The same applies to monitoring with your own prompts. There, KI Score recognizes your brand by its brand name and the aliases you've added, and your competitors by their names and aliases. There is no separate level for products.
How product names are counted
When an AI answer names a product together with its manufacturer, the analysis traces the product name back to the parent brand. “Adidas Stan Smith” therefore counts as a mention of “Adidas.” Product and model names are not treated as brands of their own.
This rule applies to the market measurement that produces your KI Score, and to the brands KI Score picks out of monitoring answers as discovered competitors.
Retailers and manufacturers in the market measurement
Whether a brand counts in a market depends on whether it is itself an option in that market:
- Manufacturers are measured in product markets, for example Adidas in “Sneaker × Deutschland” (sneakers × Germany).
- Retailers are measured in retail markets, for example Douglas in “Parfümerien × Deutschland” (perfumeries × Germany).
Retailers and marketplaces only count when the AI names them as an option in the measured market. If an answer mentions a retailer only as a place to buy, as a source, or as evidence for a price, it isn't counted. A retailer measured in a product-market such as “Sneaker × Deutschland” can therefore drop out as a mere point of sale. For retailers and online shops, a retail market is usually the right market.
What online shops can measure today
You can cover purchase questions about your products in monitoring with your own prompts. Write them the way your customers would ask, for example about the best product for a specific purpose or a comparison of two providers. The analysis then shows you:
- how often your brand is named in the answers to these prompts,
- how often your tracked competitors are named,
- which sources the AI cites, including individual URLs on your own domain, such as product or category pages.
Every monitoring run uses credits. Here too, the unit is the brand: monitoring shows whether your brand appears in answers to a purchase question, not which of your products the AI recommends or at what price.
What teams say about KI Score
“We finally see week by week where our brand shows up in ChatGPT and Perplexity.”
“The score finally gave us one number the whole team actually understands.”
“Instead of guessing which prompts matter, we now have real data.”
“Within the first week we already saw which competitor was beating us in AI answers.”
“Setup took one afternoon, not weeks of onboarding.”
“Finally a tool that takes AI Overviews as seriously as classic SEO.”