How Zaillor helped an India-based sports e-commerce brand become more visible in AI-generated product recommendations

Result snapshot

About the business

An India-based sports e-commerce retailer whose customers compare product category, use case, specifications, quality, price, delivery and returns before deciding what to buy.

Client identity has been withheld for confidentiality. Results are based on Zaillor's recorded monitoring of the same fixed prompts across ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini during the stated engagement period.

What AI SEO meant in this engagement

For this engagement, AI SEO meant making the brand's category, products, customer use cases and locations clear enough for answer engines to connect them with real sports e-commerce questions. Traditional SEO helps pages appear in link-based search. AI SEO adds the work of making a business understandable in answer-based search. The two work together.

The challenge

Product discovery is increasingly shaped by questions about fit, use case and trust. An e-commerce brand can have a broad catalogue and still be absent from, inaccurately described in or weakly sourced by AI-generated recommendations. The practical question was whether a shopper asking an AI system for sports equipment or a relevant product option would find the brand with the right product context and source. At baseline, engagement week 0, the brand appeared in 3 of 10 fixed prompts (30.0%), while 7 of 30 engine responses (23.3%) returned a mention. The practical goal was to make the brand easier to understand across the different situations it serves, not to chase one keyword.

The AI SEO approach

Start with real questions

We mapped 10 commercially relevant sports e-commerce questions covering sports product discovery, beginner and use-case fit, product comparison, buying guidance, and gifting or seasonal needs, then used the same fixed prompts for baseline and follow-up measurement.

Make the business easier to understand

Technical work covered full-site crawlability, robots.txt, XML sitemap and llms.txt review, plus page-level content and schema improvements across priority category, product and buying-guidance pages. Relevant Organization, WebSite, WebPage, BreadcrumbList, Product, ItemList and SearchAction markup was strengthened where applicable, with the brand's catalogue structure kept in view.

Keep learning from the answers

We re-ran the same prompts across ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini through engagement week 9, applying the same binary mention rule. Monitoring covered category, competitor and multi-region queries. Citation work included an audit, cleanup of inconsistent listings and submissions to agreed directories. Zaillor also prepared AI-optimised authority content around sports equipment, beginner buying, activity-specific fit, product comparisons and practical delivery guidance, reported weekly and supported paid PR placements through ANI and other major Indian media channels. PR was treated as authority support, not as proof of ranking or guaranteed citation.

What changed by engagement week 9

Weekly diagnostic view for India, 6 Jul – 31 Aug 2026. Each point shows the percentage of monitored AI responses that mentioned the business; it complements the fixed-prompt summary below.

We treated monitoring as a recall-style test: the same 10 fixed prompts were asked across the same three AI engines, producing 30 engine responses in each window. A positive result means the brand was named somewhere in the generated answer. The measurement does not assess ranking position, sentiment, citation quality or conversion impact.

Example prompts from the latest monitoring window

Examples shown from the 31 August 2026 India monitoring window. They illustrate individual engine responses; the headline results use the full fixed prompt set.

Why this matters to a business

An AI answer is often a decision shortcut. If a business is missing when a relevant question is asked, it may never reach the customer's shortlist. More complete and consistent information gives the business a better chance of being considered for the moments it actually serves. That is the role of Zaillor's AI SEO implementation: connect what a brand does to the questions people ask, strengthen the information answer engines rely on and measure whether that connection is improving. For this sports e-commerce business, that means being easier to find when someone asks about shoppers comparing equipment, use cases, product specifications, fit, delivery and alternatives.

The next iteration can prioritise product-level comparison, fit, delivery and returns questions, where shoppers need more specific information before completing a purchase.

Improve how your business appears in AI search

Zaillor helps teams measure, improve and monitor how their businesses are represented in AI-generated answers.