SeeWAIS
When shoppers want handmade candles delivered, does AI name your store — or a competitor's?
We put the same 25 blind buyer questions to ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude about a real direct-to-consumer candle brand in Manteca, CA — no brand name in any of them — then fact-checked every claim the assistants made against the business's own site. Below is what came back: every number from that measurement, nothing modelled.
recommended in 42 shortlist searches
of 109 candidate businesses
visibility score
wrong factual claims from AI
The summary
0 of 42 shortlist searches named this brand, and all seven product lines sit at zero. AI answered anyway: 10 wrong factual claims and 67 price quotes, none of them sourced from the site. The cause is structural — the platform's own AI instruction files send shopping agents to the platform instead of the store — so no amount of content helps until those files are rewritten.
sale of candle supplies, sale of candle tins, sale of handmade soy candles, sale of jar candles, sale of room sprays, sale of soy wax melt cubes, sale of tea light candles — all seven of them at zero — no answer about this category ties a single product to the brand.
Three of the real buyer questions we asked
Blind questions, quoted verbatim from the run — the kind a real customer types, with no brand name in them.
- “Where in Manteca can I buy handmade soy candles?”
- “For a gift, should I get a candle tin from the shop in Manteca or a candle from the grocery store?”
- “I need to order a custom-scented room spray in Manteca, who should I contact?”
One AI answer we fact-checked
“Soy candle jars (including 9 oz and 12 oz sizes)”
ChatGPT (searching the web) · brand-audit answer N02
What the fact-check found: Website lists 14oz Jar Candles and 6oz Black Candle Tins; no 9 oz or 12 oz jar sizes are shown.
Where AI names this store — line by line
| Revenue line | Named / asked | Mention rate |
|---|---|---|
| sale of candle supplies | 0 / 9 | 0.0% |
| sale of candle tins | 0 / 9 | 0.0% |
| sale of handmade soy candles | 0 / 15 | 0.0% |
| sale of jar candles | 0 / 9 | 0.0% |
| sale of room sprays | 0 / 12 | 0.0% |
| sale of soy wax melt cubes | 0 / 15 | 0.0% |
| sale of tea light candles | 0 / 6 | 0.0% |
What this means for a store owner
All seven product lines — handmade soy candles included — were named zero times across 42 shortlist searches. Not low: absent from every answer about the category this brand exists to sell into.
AI produced 10 wrong claims about the brand and quoted a price 67 times without the site being the source once. Being absent from the sources does not keep a business out of the answers — it removes the ability to correct them.
All 4 of the site's AI instruction files were generated by the e-commerce platform, not written by the owner, and they send AI shopping agents to the platform instead of the store; the same untouched template ships on 6 of the 9 leading brands in our benchmark that have the file. Rewriting that file and publishing prices in machine-readable form come before any new content.
What a report for your store looks like
The same measurement, run on your domain: every AI answer quoted in full, every factual claim checked against your site, the third-party sources the answers are built from, and a ranked action list with ready-to-paste code. The full method is published; the complete report behind every number on this page is public.
Measured September 2026. The measured business is pseudonymised; every number is real and traceable to the published run.