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AI visibility for exporters and manufacturers: do foreign buyers find you?

A buyer abroad looking for a supplier asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity. AIShortlist asks those questions every week and records whether your company is in the answer, which manufacturers are recommended instead and which pages are cited.

What is different for an exporter?

A customer at home may search for you by name; a buyer abroad does not know your name. They type the product, the country and the requirement, and AI gives them a few supplier names. You cannot see whether you are on that short list by searching in your own language.

So the measurement is done in the buyer's language, with the buyer's sentence.

Which questions are measured?

We suggest the questions after reading your site; you edit and approve them. Typical patterns:

  • "Reliable towel manufacturers in Turkey for private label"
  • "Which suppliers can deliver ceramic tiles to Germany with CE certification?"
  • "Alternatives to Chinese suppliers for stainless steel kitchen equipment"
  • "Dried fruit exporters with organic certification"

Country or city is not sent to the engine as a separate setting; a place takes effect when it is written in the question. If you want to measure a specific market, write the country into the question.

What do you see?

  • For every question on every engine: recommended, only mentioned, or not named.
  • The manufacturers recommended instead of you, including competitors from other countries. See competitor analysis.
  • The pages the answers cite: supplier directories, industry lists, trade fair and association pages, comparison articles.
  • Whether your English pages are open to bots and readable in raw HTML.
Sources screen: the pages the answers cite
Sample data. The brand is fictional.

What work typically comes up for an exporter?

  • The site does not answer what the buyer asks: minimum order, lead time, certificates, capacity. See query fan-out coverage.
  • The company is not registered in the cited supplier directories and industry lists: each page gets who to write to and a draft email.
  • The English pages are a short summary of the home-language pages; products and terms are not written out.
  • The site is slow or blocked from abroad or for bots.

Our longer article on the topic: Can foreign buyers find your export business in AI search?

What are the limits?

  • Questions can be in English or Turkish today; German, Arabic or other languages are not measured.
  • Measurement runs through the engines' official APIs; it is not identical to what a user in another country sees in the app.
  • Google AI Mode and AI Overviews are not measured. The dashboard does not connect to your traffic or sales. A recommendation is never guaranteed.

Scope and plans

The free trial measures 10 questions once on three engines, with no card. Paid plans measure weekly: Lite 10 questions ($29), Starter 25 ($79), Growth 50 ($199), Pro 150 questions ($499).

If you want separate question sets for two markets, the Growth plan includes two.

Related pages

See where you stand today

Create a question set, approve your questions and get your first result. Free, no card needed.

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