Northwind Barefoot

We asked three web-grounded AI assistants the same shopping question — "what are the best barefoot shoes for the office?" — phrased five different neutral ways, using no brand names, and repeated each. We recorded which products each assistant recommended and how often. The signal is how frequently a product appears, not its position in any list.

In this sample, Northwind appears in 96% of office answers, in all three engines (Perplexity 95%, ChatGPT 98%, Gemini 95%) — against a chance baseline of 18% for this category. Three engines clearing the bar is what a record needs to read Verified; one or two is not enough, however high the percentage.

That is the shape of a real record. These particular numbers are not one: they describe a brand that does not exist, and no engine was asked anything to produce them.

On a real record, this is where the citations go: the domains the assistants actually leaned on when they named the brand, so you can see whether a recommendation rests on independent write-ups or on the brand’s own site and a single affiliate.

This sample has none, and that is the point of leaving it empty: nobody asked an assistant anything to make this page, so there is nothing it could honestly cite. Inventing six plausible domains here would have been fabricating the one thing this product exists to not fabricate.

On a real record, every figure links to the underlying, timestamped observations, where each answer, engine, date and citation is auditable.

• It meansAI shopping assistants consistently put the brand in the answer when people ask for office-appropriate barefoot shoes.
• It doesn't meanthat the brand is "the best," or anything about sales, quality, or fit — only that it is frequently recommended by AI for this need.
• ScopeMeasured in English for the US market. A claim for another market or language requires measuring there.
• Earned, not boughtThis signal cannot be purchased. It reflects what the AI engines actually recommend, and is re-checked monthly.

On the merchant's product page, the record shows as a small, calm, monochrome badge that adapts to the store's theme. It always carries the category, the denominator, the engines, the date, and a link back to this evidence — never "ChatGPT recommends this."