The questions your buyers ask AI, and how to find yours

Published 20 October 2026 · 4 min read

Buyers don't give ChatGPT keywords. They ask long, specific questions. Where to find the ones your customers ask, and what to do with them.

On Google, people tend to type a few words: “hiking boots”. In ChatGPT they write the way they would talk to someone in a shop: “waterproof hiking boots for wide feet, under €150, delivered by Friday”.

That whole question decides which shops get recommended. The answer holds two or three shops, and the assistant tries to meet every condition in it: the wide fit, the budget, the delivery date. A shop that sells exactly the right boot but never says “wide fit” anywhere gives it nothing to match.

So the questions worth checking are the ones your buyers already ask you, in their own words, not the keywords from an SEO report. You probably have plenty of them written down. They just haven't been collected in one place.

Why the whole question matters

A two-word keyword tells you what someone wants. A buyer's question also tells you what will make them choose: size, budget, what it's for, how soon it has to arrive, what worries them. Those conditions are where a small shop can win. A big retailer may carry more hiking boots. Your shop may be the one that explains which of its boots suit wide feet.

Before answering a shopping question, ChatGPT can search the web and build its answer from the pages it finds (what exactly it searches for is a separate article). The buyer's conditions are what those pages have to match.

Where your buyers' questions are hiding

You don't need a research tool. The questions are already in your inbox and on your phone.

• Customer emails and chat. Search your inbox for “is it suitable”, “will it fit”, “will it arrive”. Questions asked before buying are the most useful, because they come before the decision.
• Messages on Allegro. Buyers write to sellers before they order, and the same few questions come back again and again.
• Reviews, yours and your rivals', on Google, Ceneo or Opineo. Note what people praise and what worried them before they ordered: the size, the delivery time, the smell of new leather.
• Phone calls and your team. Ask whoever answers the phone or packs the orders what people ask most. Many questions are never written down.
• Google Search Console, Google's free tool that shows which searches your site appeared for. In the Performance report, filter the queries for words like “how”, “which” or “best” to see the ones phrased as questions.

Turn them into questions worth checking

1. 1 Write down 5 to 8 questions in the buyer's words, not yours. If customers say “for a small car”, don't turn it into “compact ISOFIX base”.
2. 2 Keep the conditions in: budget, size, what it's for, who it's for, when it has to arrive. “Coffee beans” is a keyword. “Coffee beans for an espresso machine, not too bitter, under €25” is a buyer's question.
3. 3 Mix the kinds of buyer: someone who knows exactly what they want, and someone buying a gift who doesn't know the category at all.
4. 4 Ask each question the way a stranger would: in a fresh chat, without your shop's name, a few times over. Answers change from one chat to the next, so count across several. Our five-minute check post has the steps.
5. 5 Note which shops it recommended and the reason the assistant gave. The reason shows you which condition the winner met.
6. 6 Open your own category and product pages and look for the answer to each question, written in plain words. If buyers ask about wide feet and your page never mentions them, start there.

Answer them where the assistant will look

An assistant can only repeat what a page says. For each question, pick the page that should answer it, usually a category or a product page, and make sure the answer is there as text: “wide fit”, “fits a small car”, “sent the same day if you order by 2 pm”. A description of a line or two gives an assistant nothing to repeat, and Google's own guidance asks for content that answers the reader's question.

When one question keeps coming back, answer it once, clearly, where the buyer will see it. If people keep asking whether a boot runs small, one plain sentence next to the size chart helps the buyer and the assistant alike.

None of this guarantees your shop gets recommended. Nobody can promise that. It means that when an assistant weighs your shop against a buyer's conditions, it finds them met in writing.