What Questions Belong in an AI Visibility Client Onboarding Questionnaire for an Ecommerce Brand?

Why is ecommerce onboarding different?

For most service businesses, AI visibility depends on the website, reviews and third-party mentions. For ecommerce, several extra sources shape answers:

• Product feeds: Google Merchant Center for Google's AI features, and product data shared with ChatGPT, either through OpenAI's merchant programme or, for many Shopify and Etsy stores, through those platforms;
• Marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay and Etsy, whose listings can appear ahead of the brand's own store in some assistants' answers, though Amazon blocks several AI crawlers;
• Retailer listings, for brands sold through third parties;
• Review platforms and product review sites;
• Affiliate and "best of" lists, which shopping answers cite heavily.

Your questionnaire needs to find out who controls each of these, and where the data lives.

What should the questionnaire ask?

1. Business and goals

• What are your revenue goals for the next 12 months, and which product lines drive them?
• Why are you looking at AI visibility now? (A trigger such as a sales drop, a competitor appearing in ChatGPT, or a board question.)
• What would a successful first three months look like to you?
• Which markets and countries matter, and in which languages do customers shop?
• Are there seasonal peaks we should plan around?

2. Products and catalogue

• Which 10–30 products or categories matter most, by revenue, margin or strategy?
• Are any products being discontinued, launched or repriced in the next six months?
• Do your products have GTINs, and are model numbers consistent across channels?
• Which product attributes do customers compare most? (Size, materials, compatibility, certifications.)
• Do you have product variants, bundles or subscriptions that are hard to describe?

3. Channels

• Where do you sell: own store, Amazon, other marketplaces, retailers, wholesale, social commerce?
• What share of revenue comes from each channel?
• Do you control marketplace listings directly, or do resellers or distributors list your products?
• Do you prefer shoppers to buy on your own store, or is marketplace revenue equally welcome?

The last question matters more than it seems. If AI assistants send shoppers to Amazon and the brand is happy with that, the priority is the quality of Amazon listings, not pulling traffic back to the store.

4. Product data and feeds

• Which ecommerce platform do you use?
• Do you submit a feed to Google Merchant Center? Who manages it, and are there disapproved products?
• Are your products shared with ChatGPT and other AI shopping channels, through OpenAI's merchant programme or your store platform, and have you checked what they show?
• Is there a product information management system, or is data edited directly in the store?
• Who supplies content to retailers, and how is it kept consistent?

5. Competitors and substitutes

• Who are your three to five main competitors, in your view?
• Who do customers compare you with before buying? (This is often different.)
• Are there cheaper substitutes, own-label products or marketplace sellers that take sales from you?
• Are there resellers or impersonators using your brand name?

6. Customers and their questions

• Who buys, and what problem are they solving?
• What questions do customers ask before buying, in support tickets, chat or reviews?
• What words do customers use for your products, as opposed to your internal names?
• Which objections come up most: price, quality, delivery, returns, compatibility?
• Do customers ask for your brand by name, or search for the product type?

7. Reviews and reputation

• On which platforms do you collect reviews, and roughly how many do you have on each?
• Do you syndicate reviews to retailers?
• Are there recurring complaints we should know about before we read AI answers?
• Have you been covered in product review sites, gift guides or comparison articles?

8. Technical access

• Do you use a CDN or security service that manages bots, such as Cloudflare? Who controls its settings?
• Has anyone changed robots.txt rules for AI crawlers? Were any blocked on purpose?
• Are product details, prices and reviews in the page HTML, or loaded by scripts after the page opens?
• Is structured data on product pages managed by the platform, an app or custom code?

Bot settings are worth asking about directly. Cloudflare, for example, changed its defaults for new domains from 15 September 2026, blocking training and agent bots on pages that display ads while allowing search crawlers. A brand may be blocking crawlers it would want without knowing it.

9. Access and data

• Can we have read access to Google Analytics, Search Console and Merchant Center?
• Can we see sales data by channel, even as monthly totals?
• Is AI referral traffic tracked anywhere yet?
• Is there a post-purchase survey where we could add "how did you hear about us?" with an AI assistant option?

10. Constraints and approvals

• Are there claims you cannot make, for legal or regulatory reasons? (Health, safety, environmental or age-related claims are common.)
• Are there products or topics we should not target?
• Who approves content changes, and how long does approval usually take?
• Are there brand guidelines or banned phrases?

11. Reporting

• Who will read our reports, and what decisions will they make with them?
• How often do you want updates, and in what format?
• Are there internal metrics we should align with?

What should you research before sending it?

Do not ask clients things you can find yourself. Before onboarding, check:

• the store platform, robots.txt, and whether key pages render without scripts;
• the brand's marketplace presence and review counts;
• which competitors appear in a quick run of shopping questions in ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode and Perplexity;
• the brand's product structured data.

Pre-fill what you found and ask the client to confirm or correct it. This shortens the questionnaire and shows the client you have done work before asking for theirs.

How do you turn the answers into a baseline?

1. Build the question set from sections 2, 5 and 6: category questions for priority products, comparison questions against named competitors and substitutes, objection questions, and "where to buy" questions for each channel.
2. Keep brand-name questions separate from unbranded ones, so the mention rate is not inflated.
3. Run the baseline across the assistants shoppers use, with location and language set for each market.
4. Map findings to owners using sections 3, 4 and 10: feed issues to whoever manages Merchant Center, listing issues to the marketplace team, content to the approvers named.
5. Agree the reporting format from section 11 before the first report goes out.

Why unbranded questions matter for honest numbers is covered in whether brand-name prompts inflate AI visibility scores. The checks to run before a first report reaches a client are in what an agency should check before sending an AI visibility report.

What do people ask about ecommerce onboarding questionnaires?

How long should the questionnaire be?

Long enough to cover the sections above, but pre-fill what you can, so the client only answers what you cannot find yourself. Keep each question focused.

Should the questionnaire be a form or a call?

Both. Send the form first, then use a kickoff call to go through gaps and anything surprising.

What if the client does not know who manages their product feed?

Treat that as a finding, and agree an owner before you start: feed problems such as disapproved products or out-of-date prices need someone who can fix them.

Should we share the question set with the client?

Yes. Clients should see and approve the questions used to measure them, so the results are trusted.