Retail stores
Before the drive across town, the shopper asks which store has it and when it closes.
Someone wants trail shoes to try on before a Sunday race, a kids' bike to take home today or a tent to rent for the weekend, and asks an assistant where to go. With web search on, it reads a few pages and can name a few stores, but it can say yours has the size only where a page does.
The conditions in a shopping question are facts a store sets: the lines and brands it carries, whether an item can be checked or held, when the doors open, what it fits, fixes or rents, and how returns work. A directory can repeat your address; the rest is yours to write, on your own site.
How your customers ask
What a store hears at the counter, typed into a chat
Six facts behind a shopper's question
Each question above names a category or brand, a place, and something that must be true that day: open Sunday, in stock in a size, available to try, repaired this week, held for pickup. A store can be named for any one of those parts, or named wrongly for one, so a reading by category, brand, place and condition keeps them apart.
Six facts sit behind those conditions, all of them set by the store: what it carries, how stock is checked, the hours, the services and whether they need a booking, the pickup terms and the return terms. With web search on, an AI assistant reads a handful of pages before it replies, and an answer can say your store holds items for [n] days only where one of those pages does.
Where each fact goes on a store's site
| The shopper asks | What the store states | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| Do you sell [category]? | The categories you carry, in shoppers' words, with the lines in each | The homepage, and a page per category |
| Do you carry [brand]? | Each brand as its maker spells it, grouped by category, with the date the list was checked | A dated brands page |
| Is it in stock? | How to check one item (a stock line on its page, or a phone number and a reply time), and what "in stock" means | Product pages, and a stock and pickup page |
| Can I pick it up today? | How to reserve, how long you hold an item ([n] days), the same-day cutoff ([time]) and where to collect | The stock and pickup page |
| Are you open now? | Hours for each day, holiday hours posted ahead, and a department's own hours, such as the workshop's | Each location page, the footer and the Business Profile |
| Can I try it, or have it fitted or fixed? | What can be tried or test-ridden; each service with its price ([price]), turnaround, and appointment or walk-in | The category page, and a page per service |
| Can I return it? | Your own terms: the window, the item's condition, refund or exchange | A returns page your counsel has checked |
| Which store is this? | One name, one address and one main number, and a page for each location | Every page and every listing |
Returns, price labels and promotions answer to rules that differ between countries, states and provinces. The page states your policy rather than the rule ("returns within [n] days with a receipt"), and counsel checks it for each place you trade.
Store and its subtypes on schema.org
The structured data type for the trade is Store, "A retail good store." On schema.org its path runs Thing, Organization, LocalBusiness, Store, with a second line through Place, so a Store node takes the address, hours and department properties of a LocalBusiness. Thirty subtypes sit under it, BikeStore, BookStore, MusicStore, SportingGoodsStore, ShoeStore, ToyStore, HomeGoodsStore and HobbyShop among them. None is made for outdoor gear or running; SportingGoodsStore and ShoeStore come nearest.
Use the most specific subtype that fits, in JSON-LD, with the name and address that Google's local business page requires and the phone, hours, coordinates and price range it recommends. A workshop or rental counter with its own hours can be a department. A store that also sells online keeps its Store subtype for the premises: OnlineStore, "An eCommerce site", sits under OnlineBusiness and takes no opening hours.
The store's own node carries no rating. Under Google's review snippet rules, a business that controls the reviews about itself is ineligible for review stars, and ratings from other websites may not be aggregated. Quote real reviews as text, each with a first name, the date and the platform.
Google's guide to generative AI search says Merchant Center and a Business Profile help product and local details appear, and its page on AI features lists keeping both up to date.
What the crawl found, across all 40 trades
Our audit of 9,483 small business websites sent an AI crawler of our own, running no JavaScript, to each site's homepage, contact page and about page, in 40 trades and 90 metros across the US, Canada, Europe and the UAE, in late August and early September 2026. The figures are sample-wide, across all 40 trades; we publish no retail-only cut.
Question-and-answer content of any kind was missing from 61.5% of the sites, and 50.7% put a question in a heading without an answer a machine could isolate. On a store's site, that would be a "Do you do repairs?" heading above a photo of the workshop.
Across the same three pages, 43.1% gave an inconsistent account of who and where they are. 36.9% listed more than one phone number, 34.1% no postal address a machine could parse, and 64.7% showed no review signal a crawler could read.
Markup was absent on 17.8%, and where the rest had it, most of it described the website, not the business. 7.2% served a challenge page instead of the site, 3.0% rendered only in JavaScript and 2.1% kept their real content in a PDF: where a script-drawn stock view or a price list in a file would leave a store.
The probe beside the audit asked Claude one buyer question per business, with web retrieval on, and it named 14.9% of the 9,240 businesses, 17.7% of the 5,928 answers that gave a clearly differentiated list. Its questions were of the "best [trade] in [metro]" kind: context for a low start, not a store's rate.
Where to start, and the article for each step
- Run the crawler access check on your robots.txt, then view your stock, hours and service pages with scripts off and find the words a shopper needs.
- Spend an afternoon with the stock list open, checking four assistants' answers fact by fact, as in checking answers against the stock list.
- State stock and pickup as text, with a page for each location (availability and pickup, on the page).
- Write down the advice: fittings, staff specialties shared with consent, dated buying guides, after-sale work (a specialist store's advice, in writing).
- Mark up the store as its Store subtype and adopt the same-day change routine for brands, hours and holidays.
- Take a monthly reading with a fixed panel by category, brand, place and condition, scored as our methodology sets out.
Go deeper
Five articles, one for each part of the work
Measurement & Reporting
An afternoon with the stock list: checking four assistants' answers
Local & Industries
In stock near me: stating availability, pickup and the way to check
Content & Answer Pages
Fittings, setups and buying guides: a specialist store's advice in writing
Technical & Structure
A brand dropped, new hours, a holiday: making the change everywhere at once
Fundamentals
Category, brand, place, condition: a monthly reading for one store
Common questions before a store changes its pages
Our stock changes by the hour. Should the site say anything about it?
Yes, the parts that hold from week to week: the lines you always carry and in which sizes, how a shopper checks one item, and how long you hold a reservation. If a product page shows live counts, say when they update. "We keep [line] in sizes [range]; call to check yours" stays true on a busy Saturday.
We stock dozens of brands. Do they all go on the site?
Yes, on one dated page, grouped by category, each brand spelled as its maker spells it and marked as kept in the store or ordered in. Change the page the day a brand arrives or leaves, and move its date only then. The same-day change routine covers the other copies.
We also sell online. Which pages matter most for the store itself?
The pages only a store has: one per location with hours and directions, the stock and pickup page, one per service, and the brands page. Product pages serve both when they say whether an item can be collected, and where. The guide for online shops covers product, shipping and returns markup.
Can you promise an assistant will send shoppers to our store?
No. How an assistant composes its answer is its operator's business. We measure whether your store is named, for which questions and with which facts, fix what your pages state and what a crawler can read, and measure again with the same questions. The free visibility check is a first reading, sent within 48 hours.