For fifty years, brands that live on physical shelves have had rulers: Nielsen and Circana measure the supermarket shelf, SPINS measures the natural channel. Nobody argues with the category review; the numbers arrive, everyone acts on them.
Then a new shelf appeared. When a shopper asks ChatGPT or Gemini "what's the best magnesium for sleep," the answer is a shelf: a shortlist, in order, with reasons. Real purchase decisions follow it. And it had no ruler. Just screenshots, anecdotes, and tools that ask each question once and call it data.
AI Shelf Space is the ruler for the AI shelf. We built it vertical-first, for supplement brands, because doing this properly means hand-curating every question a real buyer would ask. That is feasible for one category done deeply, and impossible for every category done shallowly. We sample at scale, publish our methodology and our denominators, and publish the results every quarter as a free public index.
I did not set out to build an index. A supplement founder showed me a screenshot of ChatGPT recommending his brand and asked if it was true. I wanted to know if it was true in general, not once. So I asked the same question again, and again, hundreds of times, on seven assistants. The answers moved. Any single screenshot was a coin flip. That is the whole company: if one answer cannot be trusted, you need hundreds of them, every week, counted the same way each time.
My original training was in science, not marketing. A biology degree and a master's in the history and philosophy of science gave me a taste for the world of bioactive ingredients and for the careful measurement of things. Later I worked in web development and product marketing, and I explained artificial intelligence to all types of audiences, which taught me to put complex ideas simply. That is where the shelf metaphor comes from: the AI visibility tools I tried were confusing to use, and I wanted one that makes sense to the founders and marketers who will actually use it.
My book, The AI Rider, is about living and working through this technology without being run over by it. For the last year I have been doing exactly that for health and wellness brands: automating their operations and measuring how AI assistants treat them.
AI Shelf Space is one person on purpose. The sampling, the brand extraction, the alerts and the reports run as machinery. What is left for a human is the part that should never be automated: deciding what a fair question is, publishing the denominators, and answering you in writing when you ask how a number was made.
You will always get the person who built the measurement: . Questions get a written answer, usually within a business day.
AI SHELF SPACE