Christmas shoppers now ask ChatGPT where to buy. John Lewis was in 0 of 9 answers

Disclosure: I built the tool used in this post. Written with AI assistance.

"Best place to buy Christmas gifts online in the UK." More and more shoppers type a question like that into ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini instead of Google, and they shop where the answer sends them.

So I asked. Three Christmas gift questions, three AI engines, one answer each, nine answers in total, on 3 November 2026. Then I checked which retailers the answers named.

Who the AI sent shoppers to

John Lewis, the shop many Britons think of first for Christmas, was not named once, by any of the three engines. Its AI Visibility Score for these questions: 0 out of 100. Amazon scored 24, Argos 17.

Why: the engines read gift guides, not shop windows

The answers cited 110 sources. The most-cited site was Good Housekeeping's gift guides (6 citations), then a gift-list site (4). Which?, Argos and Selfridges had 2 each. An AI answer to "what should I buy dad?" is mostly a summary of the gift guides it found. (Two of the three questions named no country, so some of those guides were American: the engines answer from whatever they find.)

That gives every retailer and brand a clear to-do list for the next seven weeks:

1. Find out which gift questions your buyers ask, and whether the answers name you.
2. See which guides the engines quote for those questions. Those editors are your outreach list.
3. Re-check every week. Gift guides are updated and republished all through November and December, and the answers move with them.

Run the same check for your shop (about 2 minutes)

I used the AI Search Visibility Tracker on Apify. Paste this input with your own domain and questions:

{
  "queries": [
    "Best place to buy Christmas gifts online in the UK",
    "What are the best Christmas gifts for dad in 2026, and where should I buy them online?",
    "Best Christmas gift ideas for teenagers 2026"
  ],
  "brandDomains": ["yourshop.co.uk"],
  "competitorDomains": ["amazon.co.uk", "argos.co.uk", "notonthehighstreet.com"],
  "engines": ["perplexity-agent", "openai", "gemini"]
}

No AI API keys needed. For every answer you get:

• whether your shop is cited or named, and who is named instead,
• every source URL the engine relied on, which is your outreach list,
• one 0-100 AI Visibility Score, a score per engine and a competitor leaderboard.

Cost: $0.05 per answer. The test above (9 answers) costs $0.45. Ten gift questions on three engines every week until Christmas is about $1.50 a week.

Make it a weekly Christmas report

Save the input as a task and add a schedule in Apify Console (Schedules → Create schedule, 0 8 * * 1 runs every Monday). From the second run on, the tracker tells you what changed: answers that now name you, answers that dropped you, new competitors. Selling outside the UK? Set "language": "de", "fr" or "es" and ask the way your local shoppers ask.

Christmas shoppers are already asking. Check what the AI tells them about your shop while there is still time to change the answer.