Questions merchants ask
These are the questions that come up most often about selling through AI assistants. The answers are factual, and where something is not knowable from the outside, it says so.
Does ChatGPT read my product descriptions?
It reads what it can reach. Assistants answer from a mix of their own index, live web results and, increasingly, structured product feeds. In all three cases the raw material is your product data: title, description, category, images, price, and the structured data your theme outputs. If a description is empty, there is nothing to quote, so the product is passed over for one that can be described.
How do AI shopping assistants decide which products to show?
Nobody outside those companies knows the ranking. What is observable is what they need in order to answer at all: a product that states what it is, who it is for, and the attributes the shopper asked about, such as material, size, waterproof rating or compatibility. A title like "Nordlicht" tells an assistant nothing. "Nordlicht lightweight waterproof rain jacket in recycled polyester" can be matched to a question.
Do I need product descriptions in every language I sell in?
If you want to appear in answers given in that language, yes. A shopper asking in Dutch gets an answer built from Dutch text. An untranslated German title is not a small cosmetic gap: in that language the product effectively has no description at all. This is the most common problem we see in European catalogs, and it is invisible in the admin because the product looks complete in the primary language.
Is this just SEO with a new name?
It overlaps, and it is not the same. Search engine work optimises a page for a ranking algorithm. This is about whether a machine can state, from your data, what the product is and whether it matches a request. Good structured data helps both. The difference shows up in the details: an assistant needs facts and attributes, a search engine tolerates prose that never says what the thing is.
What is llms.txt, and do I need one?
It is a small text file at the root of a site that gives assistants a short, factual summary and links to the pages that matter. It is a convention, not a standard, and no assistant is obliged to read it. It costs ten minutes and it cannot hurt. It is not a substitute for product data: no summary file will compensate for empty descriptions.
Will an app change my products without asking?
Klarshelf does not. Every proposal is shown next to the current value, nothing is written until you approve it, and every applied change is logged and can be undone from the change log. That is a deliberate design choice: bulk edits that cannot be reversed are how catalogs get damaged.
What does Klarshelf cost?
The audit and the translation coverage report are free, with 20 AI proposals included. Starter is $19 a month for 200 proposals and a weekly re-scan, Growth is $49 a month for 1,000 proposals and a daily re-scan. Billing runs through Shopify, on your usual Shopify invoice, and paid plans include a 7 day free trial.
What data does it access?
Products, translations, languages and markets. It never asks for customer or order data. The application and its database run in Frankfurt.