Notes from
the new shelf.
Longer-form pieces on how AI-mediated discovery actually works. Everything sourced and dated; nothing we can't back up.
What the agents actually see
Original research: we probed 679 Auckland businesses across 7 verticals against Gemini, OpenAI, Claude, and Apple Maps — then verified every venue by hand. These are the findings.
Your platform is already talking to agents
Shopify auto-ships an llms.txt on every storefront that nudges AI agents toward its own commerce skill. Store owners don't know.
The shelf reshuffles on every ask
Identical queries, minutes apart, return different winners. Only a small stable core persists — that's the real shelf.
AI agents recommend ghosts
We verified every business by hand: closures, ghost listings, and stale data in every vertical — and engines cite them anyway.
Nobody is blocking the agents
Only 28 of 679 sites deny AI crawlers. Small businesses aren't walled off — they're unmentioned. Authority, not access.
Four engines, four realities
Gemini reads local editors, OpenAI reads aggregators, Claude reads the community — and Siri's layer is blind outside food and retail.
Every vertical has a kingmaker
Fresha for barbers, booking layers for restaurants, NoCowboys for plumbers — one platform per trade quietly decides who's visible.
Schema won't save you
Structured data was rare and didn't predict AI visibility. Editorial lists, review platforms, and Reddit did.
The invisibility wall
60% of 537 real businesses were surfaced by no AI engine at all. The long tail exists only on the map.
Start here if you're new
What is shelf engineering?
The AI shelf metaphor. Why discovery is being rewritten. What we believe — and what we won't pretend to know.
How LLMs actually work
Training data vs. inference. What's known, what's reverse-engineered, what's still unknown. No snake oil.
LLM adoption is exploding
Data, charts, and citations showing how fast large language models are being adopted across every industry.
Reading is step one.
The question that matters is what an agent would say about your business — today.
Check if you're on the shelf →