# Genesis 03 — AI Shopping Visibility and the Buy Path Problem

> Genesis 03 studies how ChatGPT and Gemini route shopper demand after recommending ecommerce brands: official wins, third-party leaks, and no-PDP losses.

- Canonical: https://caeliai.com/research/genesis-03
- Markdown: https://caeliai.com/research/genesis-03.md
- Publisher: Caeliai (https://caeliai.com), founder-led AI commerce research and advisory studio by Kalan Peace
- Official LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/caeliai/
- Founder LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kalan-peace-2b2a18198
- Contact: contact@caeliai.com

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Published May 6, 2026. Also published as “AI Shopping Visibility: The Buy Path Problem”.

Genesis 03 studies how ChatGPT and Gemini route shopper demand after recommending ecommerce brands.

A recommendation is only commercially useful if it can turn into a clean route to buy. This field study tracks which recommendations become official product-page wins, which leak to third-party merchants, and which end without a usable purchase path.

**Quick read**

The paper follows public AI shopping conversations from recommendation through routing outcome, then separates brand visibility from buy-path quality.

## What the study measures.

The study treats AI recommendation as a routing system. Once a model names a brand, the question becomes whether the shopper is sent somewhere that the brand owns, somewhere it does not, or nowhere commercially useful.

**Method**

- 66 public ChatGPT and Gemini shopping conversations.
- Conversation link to full Markdown to compact evidence trail.
- Temperature-zero extraction for brand, merchant, and routing outcome.
- Deterministic aggregation into winner, leak, loser, and site-health layers.
**Outcome taxonomy**

Official wins send demand to the brand's own page. Third-party leaks route the shopper to retailers or marketplaces. No-PDP losses recommend a brand without giving the shopper a usable product-detail path.

- **36.8%** - Official winners
- **17.6%** - Third-party leaks
- **45.5%** - No-PDP losers
**Core claim**

> AI assistants can recommend a brand and still fail to create a buy path.

That makes visibility a two-step problem: getting named by the model, then making sure the system can route the shopper to the right commercial surface.

**Site health layer**

Genesis 03 also scans canonical brand domains as a separate diagnostic layer. The paper finds site health is weakly correlated with AI routing, so it should be treated as a related but distinct signal.

- **257** - Domains scanned
- **231** - Accessible sites
- **41/100** - Median health score
**Source trail**

The full PDF includes the 66-link source matrix so each result can be traced back to a public AI conversation and the extraction evidence used for scoring.

**Why it matters**

Brands are already being recommended inside AI shopping experiences. Genesis 03 shows that the next question is whether those recommendations send demand to the right place.