AI visibility for marketplace sellers: what to do if you have no website of your own

The AI visibility of a seller with no website of its own is whether engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude or Google AI Overviews mention that seller and its products in their answers. The pages the engines can read about such a seller are mostly product and store pages on the marketplace, reviews and price comparison sites. In our own measurements these sites appeared as sources on all five engines, and the real work a seller can do is to keep those pages complete and consistent.

If you have no website, where does AI read about you?

When an AI engine answers by looking at the web, it reads the pages it can find. If you have no domain of your own, the pages that can be read about you are on other people's sites:

• Product pages: The product title, description, specifications, and questions and answers on the marketplace.
• Store page: Seller name, rating, contact and returns information.
• Reviews: What buyers write on the product page or on complaints sites.
• Price comparison sites: Pages that list the same product side by side with different sellers.

The layout of none of these pages is in your hands. But you write a large part of their content, especially the product information and the answers to questions.

This applies to many sellers. According to the Türkiye'de E-Ticaretin Görünümü Raporu 2025 (Outlook of E-Commerce in Turkey Report 2025), published by Turkey's Ministry of Trade in May 2026, 634,611 businesses engaged in e-commerce in 2025. According to the same report, 79.2% of businesses selling on marketplaces operate on a single marketplace (excluding the food sector). For most of these sellers, the pages on that one marketplace may be their most visible trace on the web.

How often do marketplace pages appear as sources?

In our own measurements, marketplaces came up regularly among the sources the engines showed about Turkish brands. The first measurement (Measurement A) covers 60 analyses up to 3 August 2026: 19 brand records, five engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews), 10,474 successful answers. The questions included some with and some without the brand name, and were mostly about products and categories. The figures were recounted on 7 October 2026.

The table below shows in how many of the 60 analyses a site was cited at least once:

Cells marked "not counted" are where we did not recount that information for this article; they do not mean "none".

The second measurement (Measurement B) was carried out between 16 and 25 August 2026 for three corporate brands (a pharmaceutical company, a dairy brand, a technology group), and only questions without the brand name were asked. Across the 1,646 answers measured, trendyol.com was among the cited sites for all three brands: in 53 answers (3.2%). Of those answers, 28 came from Perplexity, 22 from Claude and 3 from ChatGPT. In this measurement Gemini's sources were not resolved to sites, so the site list covers four engines.

How do you measure by brand name?

A common part of measuring a brand's visibility is checking whether the engine cites the brand's own site. If you have no website, that question falls away. The measurement should be built on the brand name instead of the domain.

1. Write questions without the brand name

Write questions a buyer would ask before knowing you, such as "Ankara'da el yapımı deri cüzdan satan mağazalar hangileri?" ("Which stores in Ankara sell handmade leather wallets?"). A question that contains your name already guarantees that your name appears in the answer; it measures the echo of the question, not visibility. We explained this distinction in detail in the article how to measure brand visibility in AI.

2. Pin down every spelling of your name

List the spellings of your store name with and without Turkish characters (such as "Çınar Deri" and "Cinar Deri"), its abbreviations and the full form shown on the marketplace. If any of these appears in an answer, you count as mentioned.

3. Weed out namesakes

Store names are often common words. The name "Çınar Deri" could also refer to a workshop in another city or to an entirely different company. A name appearing in an answer does not prove that you were mentioned: check whether the products, the city and the marketplace the answer describes are yours.

4. Record which marketplace page was cited

If the answer cites a source, is it your store or product page, or a competitor's page? Store the source address with every answer. If an engine cited no source or no answer could be retrieved, record that as a separate situation, not as "not mentioned".

Our scan requires a domain: it measures whether AI crawlers can access a site. For a seller with no website there is no site to scan; in that case, the steps above can also be applied by hand.

Next step

Is your brand named in AI answers?

The visibility measurement asks five engines Turkish questions that do not name your brand, and records every answer. Answers that could not be measured are shown separately, never as zero.

See the visibility measurement

What can sellers do?

A marketplace page is not your site, but you enter most of its content. The following are tasks in the seller's hands that directly affect the information an engine can read.

Write complete product titles. The title should contain your brand name, what the product is and its distinguishing feature (material, size, colour). Instead of "Cüzdan" ("Wallet"), a title such as "Çınar Deri el yapımı dana derisi erkek cüzdanı, kahverengi" ("Çınar Deri handmade calfskin men's wallet, brown") says in one line what the product is and whose product it is.

Do not leave attribute fields empty. Marketplaces' product attribute fields (material, origin, warranty, dimensions) are structured information. Leaving a field empty means removing from the page the information that would answer that question.

Answer questions. The questions buyers ask on the product page are very similar to the questions other buyers will ask AI. A clear, short and accurate answer stays on that page as readable information.

Keep your store information up to date. Keep the store description, city, contact details and returns terms current. If you have a physical shop, Google's AI features and your website page also lists checking that your Merchant Center and Business Profile information is up to date among its recommended practices.

Write your brand name the same way everywhere. Use the same spelling on the marketplace, on your social media account, on your shipping labels and in your replies on complaints sites. A single spelling makes it clear, to buyers and to any measurement alike, that the pages about you belong to the same business.

Reply to reviews. A calm, solution-focused reply to a complaint, posted where the complaint is read, becomes part of what that page says about you. We compiled how often the engines read complaints sites in the article who AI reads about Turkish brands.

Limits: the marketplace's rules and what is not in your hands

A marketplace page is the marketplace's site. The layout of the page, which information is shown and how search engines access the page are the marketplace's decisions. For example, Google writes that for a page to be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews, it must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a search result snippet; those settings are in the hands of the site owner, not the seller.

Every marketplace's seller agreement and content rules apply. Stuffing keywords into titles against the rules, using another brand's name or steering reviews can conflict with the marketplace's rules and put your store at risk. None of the suggestions in this article replace those rules.

Finally: none of these steps guarantee that an engine will mention you. Engines do not give the same answer to the same question every time: in research SparkToro published in January 2026, 600 volunteers asked 12 questions to ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI a total of 2,961 times, and the probability of the same list of brands coming back in two answers was below one percent for ChatGPT and Google. A page being read does not mean your name will appear in the answer, either. What you can do is make sure you are read correctly and completely wherever you are read, and measure the result again with the same questions.

Frequently asked questions

Can I appear in AI without my own website?

Yes, engines do not read only brands' own sites. In our own measurements, trendyol.com, hepsiburada.com and akakce.com were cited in between 15 and 17 of the 60 analyses up to 3 August 2026, and all five engines cited all three. However, this shows that marketplaces are read, not that a particular seller will be mentioned.

Which marketplace is read most by AI?

In our own measurement, trendyol.com and hepsiburada.com were cited in 17 of the 60 analyses, akakce.com in 15, n11.com in 9 and amazon.com.tr in 7. These results come from our own client and comparison brands, do not represent the whole market, and the order may be different in your category.

How do I measure my visibility without a domain?

Ask several engines the questions a buyer would ask without your brand name, search for every spelling of your name and weed out namesakes. Record each answer, its engine, its date and the sources it cited. Record questions that returned no answer separately, not as "not mentioned".

Does selling on more than one marketplace increase visibility?

We have not measured this and cannot promise a result. In our own measurement, several marketplaces were among the sites the engines read, but we have no data on how a seller being present on more than one marketplace affects mentions. The decision should weigh each marketplace's rules together with your own business circumstances.