Does AI know what you actually sell?
Shops live or die on being findable for the thing someone wants right now. When that search happens through an assistant, being described vaguely — or as selling something you stopped stocking two years ago — is the difference between a visit and a drive past your door to somewhere else. The answer is a sentence, and you do not get to see it unless you look.
What your customers are asking
Where can I buy [product] near me today?
Bike shop in [area] that does repairs
Independent bookshop in [town]
Does [your shop] sell [product category]?
Every scan asks questions like these on ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, then compares each answer with your real details.
What goes wrong for local retail and shops
What you sell gets summarized, and summaries go stale
Product ranges change far faster than the listings and pages describing them. An assistant working from older sources will confidently describe an inventory you no longer carry, or omit the category that now makes you most of your money. Verity shows what each assistant claims you sell so you can see where the description has drifted.
Services attached to retail are the first thing forgotten
Repairs, fittings, rentals, custom orders — the services that separate an independent shop from a big-box competitor are often exactly what assistants omit. If an assistant does not know you do repairs, you are not in the answer for the person searching for one.
You are being ranked against nearby shops in every answer
Ask for a shop selling anything and the assistant offers a short list. Verity reports who appears on that list alongside you and how often, per assistant — a concrete view of your local competitive set as customers actually encounter it.
The detail that matters most here: your category and hours together
Retail needs two things right at once: what you sell, and whether you are open when someone wants it. Either being wrong breaks the trip. Verity checks both against your Google Business Profile on every scan across all three assistants, and ranks what to fix first so you are not left comparing three reports yourself.
Illustrative example.
Questions from local retail and shops
Read the full FAQWe sell online as well as in store. Does that change anything?
The check is on how assistants describe your business to someone searching locally, which is where a physical shop's advantage lies. If online sales matter to you too, the same report still shows what assistants say you stock, since that description drives both kinds of visit.
How quickly will a fix show up in AI answers?
Honestly, it varies and nobody can promise a timeline — assistants pick up source changes on their own schedule, sometimes weeks apart. That is exactly why re-scanning matters: it is the only way to confirm a correction actually reached the assistants rather than assuming it did.