A visibility report is credible only when another reviewer can inspect why a result received its label. A brand name, a retailer citation, and an official product-page citation are not equivalent.
The worked answer snippets below are synthetic test fixtures, not claims about a real ChatGPT or Perplexity run. Real reports must retain the original provider output and timestamp.
Evidence decision table
| Level | Required observable evidence | Counts as storefront citation? |
|---|---|---|
| Domain verified | visible source URL matches an approved storefront domain | yes |
| Brand mention only | answer contains approved brand string, no storefront source | no |
| Third-party product evidence | answer cites retailer, marketplace, or editorial URL | no |
| Inferred association | provider metadata suggests a match but source cannot be inspected | no |
| Completed non-mention | usable answer contains no approved brand or domain | no |
| Provider failed | timeout, refusal, rate limit, or unusable response | excluded |
| Not tested | no attempt was made | excluded |
Fixture 1: domain verified
Prompt:
Which beginner crochet kits include video instruction?
Cite the product page for each recommendation.
Synthetic answer fixture:
Example Kit includes step-by-step video instruction.
Source: https://shop.example.com/products/example-kit
If shop.example.com is in the approved domain registry and the URL is visibly attached to the claim, classify it as domain_verified.
Store:
{
"state": "success",
"mention_level": "domain_verified",
"matched_domain": "shop.example.com",
"source_url": "https://shop.example.com/products/example-kit",
"matched_brand": "Example",
"source_visible": true
}
Fixture 2: brand mention only
Consider Example, Brand B, and Brand C.
Sources: reviewpublisher.example/best-kits
The merchant is named, but its storefront is not a visible source. Record the brand mention and the third-party citation separately. Do not display “official store cited.”
Fixture 3: third-party product evidence
A marketplace product URL can correctly support price or stock for that marketplace. It does not verify the merchant’s direct Shopify storefront. Store source_class: marketplace and preserve the full URL.
Fixture 4: completed non-mention
A usable answer recommends three competitors and omits every approved store domain and brand string. This is completed_non_mention. Named competitors remain valuable evidence and should be retained.
Fixture 5: provider failure
{
"state": "rate_limited",
"http_status": 429,
"answer": null,
"mentions": null,
"citations": null
}
Use null, not an empty array. An empty array means an answer was inspected and contained no match. A missing answer cannot be scored.
Domain registry
Maintain explicit entities:
merchant_id: example-store
approved_domains:
- example.com
- shop.example.com
approved_brand_strings:
- Example
- Example Store
excluded_strings:
- example product category
Normalize URLs before matching:
- lowercase host
- remove default port
- preserve path and market host
- follow provider redirects only when inspectable
- do not treat a brand’s social profile as its Shopify domain
A storefront transport preflight is not mention evidence
On July 27, 2026, SkuWatch AI Visibility sent requests to five commerce pages using browser-like and crawler-associated User-Agent strings. The observed 200 values establish only a transport result for spoofable headers from SkuWatch AI Visibility’s network location. A body-verified result can contribute storefront-readiness evidence, but it still does not identify a provider crawler.
None of those responses counts as an AI mention because no provider answer was generated or inspected. This boundary prevents a scanner from turning “our synthetic request received a page” into “the brand is visible in ChatGPT.”
Calculation rules
completed = domain_verified + brand_only + third_party + non_mention
mention_rate = all brand mentions / completed
storefront_citation_rate = domain_verified / completed
completion_rate = completed / scheduled
Publish all three denominators. A 30% mention rate with a 40% completion rate is not comparable to a 30% mention rate with 99% completion.
Reviewer checklist
- exact prompt and timestamp retained
- provider and displayed mode recorded
- original answer remains inspectable
- full source URL saved
- source domain matched against an approved registry
- brand-only results not upgraded to citations
- provider failures excluded from completed rates
- ambiguous matches routed to human review