Prominence-Stratified Failure Modes in Retrieval-Augmented Commercial Recommendation: A 37,000-Run Audit
AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude are recommendation engines, not search engines: they answer commercial queries by directly nominating brands rather than returning a list of links. Marketing to AI is therefore a broader problem than "show up in search" -- positioning, content, and product fit matter as much as discoverability. We audit ~37,000 production runs across four model configurations and 215 commercially-framed prompts spanning 19 sectors, evaluated against a 533-brand reference catalog stratified into five prominence tiers (L1 category leaders to L5 regional players) sourced from external authority lists. The ladder proxies a brand's awareness footprint within its sector, no...
| Authors | Will Jack, Noah Lehman, Keller Maloney et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.IR |
| Published | 22 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 22 May 2026 |
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