Questions commerce teams ask about CEI.

It rhymes with SEO, but it is a different job. SEO and SEO tools optimize a page to rank in human search. CatalogSignal works one layer down, on whether an AI assistant can recommend your product and describe it correctly: it scores how machines read your catalog across structured attributes, differentiation, retrieval, claim integrity, and authority, every finding backed by product-level evidence, not opinion. It assumes you are already doing good SEO and picks up where that work stops.

The CEI is a 0 to 100 score that measures whether AI shopping systems can find, understand, trust, and recommend your products. It evaluates the catalog data layer across five pillars and 16 evidence-backed signals.

Comparable mode uses only the public view any AI agent can crawl, so scores are comparable across brands. Authorized mode adds the private feeds and APIs you already share with commerce partners, which makes more signals computable and the score more complete.

For a baseline, very little: your brand and a representative set of product pages. Authorized mode is optional but strongly encouraged, and only uses the private feeds and APIs you choose to share. It makes more signals computable and the score more complete. We will scope the right starting point with you.

A baseline CEI Diagnose typically takes about 10 to 14 business days. Activate work runs over a few weeks depending on scope, and Protect is an ongoing, per-product-page safeguard.

An executive scorecard with your readiness band and drivers, a technical evidence package with product-level findings, and a prioritized remediation roadmap mapped to owners and impact.

Your authorized, private data is treated as confidential and is never repurposed for competitor benchmarking; comparisons only ever use the public view anyone can see. We keep diagnostics evidence-backed and inspectable.

Organizations whose products are increasingly discovered through AI shopping and answer agents, and the commerce, marketing, and data leaders accountable for whether those agents can find, trust, and recommend them. Today that is mostly retailers and consumer brands; the same readiness gap is emerging across more categories as AI-mediated discovery expands.