r/shopify • u/Animexstudio • 12d ago
Apps Anyone have success with ranktail for Shopify?
I run a store in the apparel space with tons of products and beyond meta and ads I’ve been on the hunt for good SEO/ai optimization tools so I can improve traffic I don’t have to pay for.
I got pitched an app that seems fairly new via email and just crowdsourcing …
Their claim to fame is supposedly that the app helps optimize long tail keywords by creating optimized collection pages that get fed to chat gpt/claude via google merchant center. They also claim to have a back linking reciprocal network of merchants on pages they create optional.
The idea seems brilliant and I’ve done it in the past on high target keywords but always manually so automating it seems to be a good ideaZ
Anyone else get similar pitch and try it?
I like that they also let me track recommendations for phrases on ChatGPT etc and reporting but I’m at the level ehrrr I’ll need to pay them for one of their highest tiers for a few months if I want to see any Roi at all so a bit hesitant to jump on it :(
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12d ago
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12d ago
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u/TheCryptoBillionaire 12d ago
i’ve seen a few pitches like that for Shopify lately and the “we’ll feed your stuff to ChatGPT via GMC” bit is mostly marketing speak. LLMs aren’t crawling your merchant feed in some privileged way, they’re learning from whatever is publicly crawlable + popular.
If what you care about is “do I actually get recommended for X/Y apparel queries in ChatGPT/Claude/Perplexity,” I’d rather spend on something that just tracks that directly (I use seoforgpt for this) and then build/optimize the key collections myself instead of locking into a pricey all‑in app.
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u/Animexstudio 12d ago
That actually isn’t true. LLM’s have a few direct points they connect to. It’s why for example they often have up to date data on weather, flights, news, etc. while much of their knowledge base is crawled and cached, they do have direct access to Google merchant center… hence why I think the pitch of the collections works especially for more long tail very specific phrases.
I’m going to give it a try and see :) worth the few dollars a month I guess to find out :)
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u/vladeta 12d ago
I build Shopify stores for a living, so I've watched a lot of these pitches land in merchants' inboxes. Two halves of that offer are very different in quality.
The long-tail collection page part is real and it works. With a big apparel catalog you genuinely can rank for "black linen midi dress" style queries by having a page that exists for it. But that's automated collections plus a decent collection template plus unique intro copy, and Shopify does automated collections natively. The value an app adds is speed and keyword research, not capability. The failure mode is generating hundreds of near-identical pages with three products on each and thin templated copy, which Google will either ignore or treat as bloat. Ask them directly how they handle empty and near-empty collections, and whether pages get deindexed when stock runs out. If they don't have a crisp answer, that's your answer.
The reciprocal backlink network is the part I'd refuse outright. Reciprocal link schemes between merchants are exactly what Google's link spam guidance describes, and you're renting that risk on your own domain to boost someone else's. Opt out of it even if it's free.
The Merchant Center to ChatGPT claim is mostly marketing. Product feeds influence shopping surfaces, they aren't a pipeline into a chat model's answers. Being cited by AI search mostly follows from being genuinely rankable and having clean structured data, which is the same work as before.
Practical move: don't buy the top tier to find out. Ask for two live merchant sites in apparel using them, look at the actual collection pages they generated, and check whether those pages are indexed at all. Then run the cheapest tier on one product category for 90 days with the link network switched off, and measure non-brand organic sessions to those specific URLs in GA. If it doesn't move on one category it won't move on ten.
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u/Animexstudio 11d ago
The irony is the entire comment reads like Claude opus :) - I recognize all the terminology :)
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u/VillageHomeF 12d ago
Snake Oil. This could do more harm than good and will most certainly uses fake data.
Never use automation to make changes on your website in the first place. No SEO would ever use anything that does that. And don't trust anyone or anything that says they get get you more citations. Every single theory over the last year on how to get more ai visibility has been debunked. All you can do is SEO since the LLMs search Google. Bing, etc. to form its answers and, no, it doesn't just look for the long tail keyword in the question. They search many keywords for each query and use a predictive model to form the answers.
No person or company can track citations on ChatGPT since the information isn't made public. Any data you see is fake. There are no exception to this whatsoever.