The window is closing for two reasons. Every month of delay means more stores establishing themselves in AI answers ahead of you.
Reason 1: models are learning to separate “authoritative” from “accurate”
Right now AI engines give roughly equal weight to RAG (fresh web search) and training data. That is changing. In July 2025 the SEO analyst Alexis Rylko showed that ChatGPT had quietly switched from Bing to Google and begun reproducing the citation order straight from the Google SERP — Shopify references that research in its own AEO guide. Which means the authority filter is already switching on. Google AI Overviews leans towards large publishers more heavily than Perplexity or ChatGPT do. With every model update the weight of training data will grow, and niche players will lose ground.
Reason 2: Amazon is waking up
Amazon is already building Rufus, its own AI shopping assistant, and plugging into the agentic commerce ecosystem — its agreements with Visa Intelligent Commerce Connect and the arrival of “Buy for me” inside AI interfaces make this a question of months rather than years. Once Amazon starts systematically optimising pages for query fan-out, the RAG advantage that niche stores enjoy will evaporate. The only reason it is not doing so today is that it does not yet see a threat.
A realistic estimate is a 6–12 month window of opportunity. That is my own estimate, based on how fast large retailers index and how quickly AI engines evolve. Call it conservative or aggressive as you like — what matters is that the window is finite.
What to do this week
If in part one you opened ChatGPT and found three queries where the AI cites someone other than you, it is time to act. Three steps.
First. Pick one question and write the page that answers it better than anything else on the internet. Not marketing copy — an honest analysis with numbers, caveats and competitors named outright. A shopper who came for an answer will repay you in loyalty.
Second. Wrap the page in FAQ schema and Product schema. Without structured data, an AI cannot tell which part of the page is the answer and which is decoration.
Third. After 30 days, check those same three queries. If your store is being cited, scale the formula to the other questions. If not, revisit the page — it most likely still reads as an advert rather than an answer.
Above all: write as though the AI were reading it aloud to the shopper. Because that is literally what it does.