Study: 1 in 4 Swedish Online Stores Never Mentioned by ChatGPT

A study of 189 small Swedish online retailers found that the amount of text on the homepage, was linked to how often AI services recommended a store.

BORÅS, VG, SWEDEN, November 9, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- One in four small and mid-sized Swedish online stores was never mentioned by ChatGPT when asked about the products the store sells. That is the main finding of a study by KLOTA AB, a digital marketing agency in Borås, Sweden, which ran 189 Swedish online retailers with annual revenue between SEK 3 million and SEK 30 million through its AI visibility analysis on November 4, 2026.

For each store, three shopping questions in Swedish were generated from the store’s homepage, without the store’s name, and put to both ChatGPT and Claude with web search. Across the 1,123 answers, 28 percent of the stores did not appear in any of ChatGPT’s three answers. In Claude the share was 29 percent, and 19 percent of the stores were not mentioned by either service.

What set the mentioned stores apart was text. Stores with fewer than 220 words on the homepage were mentioned in an average of 2.4 of 6 answers, while stores with more than 970 words were mentioned in 3.3. Stores with at least one heading written as a question were mentioned in 3.4 of 6 answers, compared with 2.6 for stores without. Among the 50 stores that had both at least 500 words and question headings, only 3 were never mentioned. Among stores with little text and no question headings, one in four was never mentioned. Company size made no clear difference: stores with SEK 12 to 30 million in revenue were not reliably mentioned more often than those with SEK 3 to 6 million.

“The door is open. Almost every store lets the AI services in, so that is not where mid-sized retailers lose out,” said Anders Karlsson, founder of KLOTA. “What separates the stores that get mentioned from those that don’t is whether there is text on the page that answers the customer’s question. If there is nothing to quote, there is nothing to recommend.”

Access was rarely the problem. 98 percent of the stores allowed the crawlers that ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude use to answer questions, and in server tests no store blocked them. One in three stores had an llms.txt file, but those stores were not mentioned more often: 16 percent of stores with the file and 15 percent without were never mentioned.

When a store was not mentioned, the AI services recommended one of Sweden’s 100 largest online retailers instead in four cases out of ten. Many homepages also lacked information an AI service can repeat: 40 percent showed no concrete terms for shipping, delivery or returns, and only 11 percent had fully completed the structured data that describes the company.

The services also disagreed. Claude mentioned the stores in 47 percent of its answers and ChatGPT in 39 percent, and one store in five was mentioned by only one of them. According to the Swedish Internet Foundation’s report Svenskarna och internet 2026, 52 percent of Swedes use ChatGPT.

“Don’t judge your visibility from a single answer in a single service,” Karlsson said. “Ask the questions your customers ask, in more than one AI service, and ask again a week later.”

The stores were drawn in random order from KLOTA’s database of Swedish limited companies registered for online retail. Only stores selling to consumers in their own Swedish-language web store with prices in SEK were included, and KLOTA’s current and former clients were excluded. The differences for text and question headings are statistically significant in a Mann-Whitney test, but the study shows correlation, not cause. AI answers vary between runs, and answers via API may differ from those in the apps.

The findings were first reported by the Swedish trade publication ehandel.se. The full study, including method and limitations, is published in Swedish on klota.se. KLOTA conducted and funded the study independently and sells services in this field. No store paid to be included, and no individual stores are named.

About KLOTA
KLOTA AB is a digital marketing agency based in Borås, Sweden, founded in 2017 by Anders Karlsson. The agency works with Google Ads, search engine optimization and visibility in AI search for e-commerce companies and local businesses. KLOTA is a Google Partner and was a Google Premier Partner eight years in a row, 2017-2024.

Anders Karlsson
+ +46 31 27 77 40
KLOTA AB
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