How Appointo used GetIntel to find and fix the AI-visibility gaps costing it recommendations in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overview — going from 13% to 28% in 4 weeks.
Buyers have moved on from browsing the Shopify App Store first. Increasingly, they ask ChatGPT or Google “best appointment booking app for Shopify” and just take the recommendation. If your app isn’t in that answer, you’ve lost the merchant before they ever see your listing page.
That’s the blind spot we didn’t know we had at Appointo — until we ran our own product through an AI visibility tool, GetIntel, which tracks where AI answer engines recommend you and where they quietly skip you for a competitor.
GetIntel starts by pulling data on your brand and category from multiple sources — Google, LinkedIn, X, Reddit — to understand how the industry actually talks about the problem you solve. From that, it builds a set of prompts modeled on how real buyers actually phrase the question, not generic keyword lists. For us, that meant prompts like:
We ran 60 of these across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overview over two weeks, to see not just whether we showed up, but where and how consistently.
Here’s what that actually looked like for one of them, before and after:
GetIntel prompt-level detail for “Best Shopify appointment booking app,” Week 0 vs Week 4.
Two things stood out.
1. We were splitting our own signal. Appointo exists both as an independent product and as a Shopify app listing, and the Shopify app listing had the stronger review base. But Google AI Overview wasn’t crediting that reputation back to the Appointo brand for general, non-Shopify-specific prompts. As far as the AI was concerned, we looked like a smaller, less-reviewed player outside the Shopify App Store context — even though the underlying product and reviews were the same.
2. Our competitors were winning off-site, not on-site. BookThatApp and Sesami weren’t beating us on product pages — they were beating us in the places AI models actually pull citations from. Both had a real, active presence on Reddit and in the Shopify Community, and those threads kept showing up as cited sources in AI answers. We had almost no footprint in either place, so AI had nothing of ours to cite.
Where AI was pulling citations from, by brand, at the start of the scan.
We’re not going to lay out the exact playbook here — some of it is specific enough to our situation that publishing it just hands the same edge to competitors reading this. But directionally, our focus came straight from the two findings: consolidating our brand signal so reviews and reputation stop reading as two separate, weaker entities, and building a genuine presence in the community spaces where AI was already sourcing its answers, instead of leaving that ground to competitors.
Four weeks later, GetIntel’s tracking showed our AI visibility had moved from 13% to 28% — more than double, across the same 60-prompt set. ChatGPT is where we gained the most ground, which tracks — it’s also the engine most sensitive to the kind of community footprint we were building.
Blended AI visibility score, Week 0 through Week 4.
That’s the blended number. Broken down across all 60 prompts, the shift looked like this:
Full 60-prompt coverage, before and after.
We’re not done. There’s more gap left to close, and we’re still working through it. But going from being skipped on most relevant prompts to being recommended more than one in four times, in under a month, is a strong signal that this is fixable — you just have to know where you’re actually losing.
The takeaway: Start tracking your AI visibility. Buyers have moved from the App Store, and the real game now is AI search.
If you’re running a Shopify app or SaaS product and want to see where AI is skipping you, run your own AI visibility scan with GetIntel.
