In late August 2026 I built a one-product Shopify store and tried to get Google’s AI Overview and ChatGPT to cite it, using nothing but the pages on the site. I walked about twenty ecommerce operators through the result at the Ecom Unfiltered Coffee Chat in Singapore on 3 September. This is that talk, written up.
The store is mine, so everything is shown, including where it came short.
The challenge
I took away every usual advantage on purpose, so whatever happened could only come from the method.
| Starting position | |
|---|---|
| Domain age | 11 days on the day of the talk |
| Backlinks built | None |
| Paid spend | S$0 |
| Google Business Profile | None (the store has no premises) |
| Reviews | None |
| Existing audience | None |
The product: bottled Vietnamese milk coffee, 10 bottles for S$39, delivered chilled on Fridays across Singapore. The competition: established roasters and caterers, some with thousands of reviews and years of delivery history.
I also did no off-site work at all. No outreach, no guest posts, no listings, no mentions. That was the point of the experiment.
What happened in ten days
| 1 hour | to the first new pages indexed by Google |
| 24 hours | to page one of Google |
| 48 hours | to the first AI Overview citation |
| 3 of 5 | commercial queries where the store was listed first in the AI Overview |
| S$0 | spent on links or advertising |
On “bottled coffee for events”, the opening line of Google’s answer used our price as the reference figure for the whole category. That sentence came straight from the first paragraph of our page.
ChatGPT, asked logged-out where to buy bottled coffee in bulk for an event in Singapore, named the store first on both checks, above an established roaster. On 1 September it quoted pack sizes that had been on the page for about an hour. The feedback loop is hours, not months.
On 2 September, ten days after launch, an exhibition contractor emailed asking for 150 custom-labelled bottles for a trade show, quoting the catering page’s own words.
AI answers are regenerated on every search and change week to week. These are what the engines returned on those days, not a fixed position.
The measurement that explains it
For every page Google cited on these queries, we counted the facts an AI can lift (prices, sizes, pack counts, delivery terms) in the visible prose, then divided by the word count.
| Page | Words | Checkable facts | Facts per 100 words |
|---|---|---|---|
| Competitor A | 931 | 21 | 2.3 |
| Competitor B | 1,044 | 19 | 1.8 |
| Competitor C | 2,576 | 11 | 0.4 |
| Our page, day 2 | 272 | 10 | 2.3 |
| Our page, day 8 | 1,142 | 31 | 2.7 |
Our page was the densest in the category from day one. Then we made it the largest as well. Density gets you read. Density times size gets you cited.
The cleanest test: “300ml” sat in the page’s HTML six times and in the visible copy zero times. It went into the body text at 4pm on 1 September, and ChatGPT was quoting it within the hour. Schema and metadata support the body copy. They don’t replace it.
Why it worked: standing out beats being better
Google’s AI builds a model of which businesses exist in a category and how they differ. If it understands you clearly, it cites you. If you could be anything, it skips you, even when you have more authority than the ones it picks.
So we read the competitive field as a set of stances and took the position easiest to tell apart from all of them:
| Everyone else in the category | What we did |
|---|---|
| Craft, origin stories, roastery heritage | Powder, milk powder and water. Said plainly. |
| Tasting notes | No tasting notes |
| Price on request | S$3.90 a bottle, on the page |
| Brewed, specialty, cold brew | Bottled, and we say it is not cold brew |
The price row mattered most. Everyone quotes on request. A flat price on the page is the opposite stance, and it’s the line Google now quotes back.
Where it came short
“Bottled coffee delivery” stayed fourth of five, held by roasters with years of delivery reputation. “Best bottled coffee for events” went to a business with 72 public reviews. Neither is fixed by writing another page. Both come from other people: reviews, listings, press, community answers.
Your own pages get you cited quickly. Other people’s pages keep you there.
Six things to do on Monday
- Before you write a page, search the question and look at the answer that comes back. No AI answer, nothing to win. A map panel means the lever is your profile, not your copy.
- Write down what you sell, who it’s for, and how you differ from the three or four names the AI already lists. Make yourself the easiest one to tell apart.
- Put the answer in the first two sentences, with real numbers.
- Count the checkable facts per 100 words on your page and on the pages the AI cites. Match their density first, then their length.
- Check Google and ChatGPT separately, and keep checking. One can drop you while the other keeps you.
- Get other people to mention you. That’s what keeps you there.
Let the machine do the counting, the checking and the drafting. Keep the judgement.
The full method, with worksheets and prompts, is in The AI Search Playbook.