AI visibility tools connect to Shopify at three depths, and the depth decides more than the logo does. Tier one is a native App Store app — currently a category of one, GEOly. Tier two is self-service integration: tools like Otterly.AI, Peec AI and Scrunch AI expose APIs, connectors or middleware you wire up yourself. Tier three is no integration at all: suite monitors like Semrush and Ahrefs that watch your domain from outside. This comparison walks the three tiers, what each buys, and which team each fits.
Key takeaways
- Sort tools by integration depth before comparing features: native app, self-service API, or no integration. Each tier trades money against engineering time and data resolution.
- GEOly is the only AI visibility tool with a native Shopify App Store app; it is also the only one whose data resolves to catalog SKUs and product cards. Disclosure: GEOly is our product.
- Tier two runs $29 to $250/month (Otterly.AI, Peec AI, Scrunch AI) and assumes an engineer; you get answer data in your dashboards, not catalog awareness.
- Tier three (Semrush $99 toolkit, Ahrefs Brand Radar from $199 per index) is credible outside-in monitoring — right when a suite already anchors your stack.
- Integration depth matters because 88.8% of ChatGPT shopping answers carry product cards; only store-aware tools can tie those cards back to your SKUs and domain.
Why depth, not features, is the sorting key
Feature lists converge — every vendor now claims mentions, citations and sentiment. What does not converge is where the tool sits relative to your store. A tool inside your store reads the catalog and attributes product cards to your domain. A tool connected by API moves answer data to you but knows nothing about your SKUs. A tool outside watches your domain like any other. Since the AI shopping shelf is card-driven (88.8% of ChatGPT shopping answers carry cards, and 14% of brand mentions have no buyable card at all), that positioning determines which questions a tool can even answer.
Tier one: native App Store app
One tool lives here. Disclosure: GEOly is our product.
GEOly AI on the Shopify App Store installs in one click and connects the catalog directly: products, prices and availability sync automatically, visibility data resolves to individual SKUs, and product cards in ChatGPT and Google AI Mode get attributed to your domain versus retailers. It tracks Share of Model and Share of Card, fan-out queries, citation sources and ChatGPT ads via the GEM dataset, and it is free to start — no engineering hours anywhere in that sentence.
