What we measure when we say a catalog is AI-ready
The Commerce Eligibility Index is grounded in an ongoing benchmark: a recurring measurement of how today’s AI shopping assistants actually read, trust, and recommend real product catalogs. It is the reference set behind every CEI score, and it grows every month.
The reference set behind every CEI score.
An ongoing measurement of AI catalog readiness that grows every month.
brands tracked across the panel.
consumer-retail categories.
readiness signals scored per brand.
AI shopping queries each cycle, and growing.
refreshed every cycle, with coverage expanding over time.
Ten retail categories, so readiness reads in competitive context.
A brand’s readiness means more against its own category than in isolation. The benchmark spans ten verticals today, and the list expands as we add coverage:
- Beauty and Cosmetics
- Consumer Electronics
- Drugstore and Discount Retail
- Fashion and Apparel
- General Merchandise and Marketplaces
- Home and Furniture
- Home Improvement
- Jewelry and Accessories
- Pet Supplies
- Sporting Goods and Outdoor
We ask the systems shoppers actually use.
We query the live systems directly and watch how they actually respond: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity.
Over 1,000 real shopping queries per brand.
For each brand we run over 1,000 LLM-generated shopping queries, drawn from the brand’s own product vocabulary (categories, attributes, use cases, and price and fit constraints), against the live assistants. We record whether the brand is found, described accurately, and recommended, and where it is missed, misrepresented, or substituted.
Those observations roll up through the 16 signals and five pillars (Foundation, Differentiation, Retrieval, Integrity, Authority) into a single 0 to 100 Commerce Eligibility Index. CEI is weighted so a strong pillar cannot paper over a weak one: the lowest pillar pulls the score, because an assistant only has to fail one check to leave a product off the shortlist.
See how the whole shelf is moving, not just your own corner.
The benchmark reads catalogs across the market to show you how AI assistants find, trust, and recommend products like yours, and where your clearest opportunities are. It surfaces patterns such as:
- How readiness varies by vertical and by assistant.
- Where catalogs are most often misread: missing attributes, boilerplate descriptions, and claims that do not reconcile.
- That high familiarity does not equal high accuracy. Well-known brands can still land in hallucination-risk positions, while cleaner brands can be under-discovered.
Shared insight for the market, private results for you.
You get the open benchmark to see where the shelf is heading, plus your own confidential scorecard that stays yours alone. A consistent scoring method keeps your results comparable cycle over cycle, so you can track real progress and act on findings only you can see.
See where your catalog sits against the benchmark.
Request a CEI assessment and we will show you your score in competitive context.
See where you stand