One in five product descriptions sampled from 1,000 Shopify stores appears word for word or nearly so on an outside domain, according to a study from Shopify agency Shero Commerce. The copies almost never sit on a rival brand’s store, and instead pile up on retailers and marketplaces that resell the brand, including Nordstrom, Sally Beauty, and Amazon. That leaves an AI model no way to tell which page wrote the words first. Shero’s citation test shows that brands’ own pages make up just 2.8% of the 1,851 sources that Google’s AI mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity cited across 60 buying categories, against 59% for publishers. The tools do recommend big DTC brands by name, but across 159 picks, the citation pointed back at the brand’s own page only 31% of the time.
