Shopping mode rate
Shopping mode rate is the share of your prompts, or of their answers, where an AI platform showed products in place of plain text.
Shopping mode rate is how often your prompts bring up products. Tools count it in one of two ways: the share of the prompts you track that bring on shopping mode, or the share of all their answers that show product cards.
It tells you how much of your tracking is about products on a shelf, and how much is about brands in a paragraph. That decides which numbers you should be reading.
Why it's useful
If most of your answers show products, your ordinary visibility only tells half the story. A brand can be named in the text and missing from the product cards, or the other way round. A high rate means your shopping numbers deserve as much attention as the rest.
A change in the rate is worth noticing too. If a platform starts showing products for questions it used to answer in text, shoppers on those questions now see a row of products, and the brands named in a paragraph count for less.
An example
Kestrel Roasters tracks 40 prompts. Over a week, on one platform, that's 280 answers. 84 of them show product cards, so 30% of its answers are in shopping mode. Almost all of those come from 12 prompts about grinders and gift sets. Kestrel decides to read its shopping numbers for those 12, and to add a few more buying questions on the same products.
How to read it
Check how your tool counts it before you compare. A prompt that shows products once in seven days counts fully as a shopping prompt in one method, and adds just one answer in the other. The second way is more cautious, since shopping mode comes and goes from day to day.
In AnswerOrbit
We don't show a rate. The Overview tab in Shopping shows Answers with products, which is how many of your ChatGPT answers in the last seven days showed product cards at all. The Prompts tab shows which of your prompts lead to shopping answers.