Evan Mallick
Tracks how AI assistants reshape the path to purchase for DTC brands. Publishes weekly share-of-voice reports.
- Share-of-voice analytics
- DTC discovery
- Weekly prompt panels
- Mid-consideration categories
- Posts
- 0
- Guides
- 14
Evan tracks how AI assistants reshape the path to purchase for DTC brands. He publishes weekly share-of-voice reports across ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity for Surfient's research feed, with a particular focus on mid-consideration categories ($60–$500 AOV) where assistant-driven discovery is overtaking social and classic search. Before Surfient, he ran growth analytics for two Shopify Plus merchants.
- Share-of-voice analytics
- DTC discovery
- Weekly prompt panels
- Mid-consideration categories
Guides authored by Evan Mallick
- engine10 min
How to get your Shopify products cited by Perplexity in 2026
Perplexity cites every source inline — which means either you are the citation or you are not in the answer at all. The ranking is freshness-biased, source-quality-biased, and forgiving to stores that get three basics right.
Co-authored with Hiren Bhuva - technical11 min
The llms.txt reference for Shopify merchants in 2026
llms.txt is not a robots.txt replacement and it is not auto-generated from your sitemap. It is a curated, editorial index of your best 20-40 pages — and for Shopify stores, a well-written one is one of the highest-leverage GEO moves you can ship.
Co-authored with Hiren Bhuva - technical12 min
Product and FAQPage schema for Shopify in 2026
The fields that matter for AI retrieval, the fields that are safe to skip, and the exact JSON-LD a Shopify PDP should emit to be quotable by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
Co-authored with Hiren Bhuva - engine10 min
How do AI engines pick which product to recommend
Retrieval, ranking, and synthesis are three separate stages with different signals. Understand the mechanism and the tactics stop feeling random.
- content10 min
How to write FAQs so AI engines actually cite them
FAQPage schema gets you into the retrieval pool. The writing decides whether you get quoted. Six rules for authoring FAQ pairs that AI engines extract verbatim — and the support-inbox-first method for picking questions.
- measurement10 min
How to monitor brand mentions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Copilot
Share of AI Voice is measurable — but only with a consistent weekly panel, a fresh session per engine, and a measurement discipline that does not confuse anecdote with data.
- engine10 min
How to rank your Shopify store in Grok (X AI) in 2026
Grok's retrieval stack is the only one with first-party access to X posts and real-time thread sentiment. For the right Shopify categories, that makes it a disproportionately high-leverage engine — for the wrong ones, it is a rounding error. Here is how to tell which you are.
- content9 min
Long-tail conversational keywords for AI search on Shopify
The phrase 'moissanite watch' is a query. 'Which moissanite watch is best for a 7-inch wrist under $500' is a prompt. The difference is what AI retrievers actually match against — and it is where Shopify merchants win or lose visibility.
- measurement9 min
AI visibility metrics: what to actually measure in 2026
AI visibility tooling has exploded. Dashboards show citation counts, share of voice, sentiment trends, brand lift estimates, and dozens of derivative metrics. Most of them are noise. The five metrics below are the ones that actually predict AI-driven revenue on a Shopify store — and the ones we recommend brands measure consistently.
- technical9 min
Canonical URLs for AI crawlers: a Shopify-specific guide
Shopify ships the same product under three different URLs by default. For AI retrievers, that splits citation authority across near-duplicate pages — the fix is correct rel=canonical hygiene applied to every Shopify-specific duplication pattern.
- technical8 min
BreadcrumbList schema for Shopify: implementation and AI citation effects
BreadcrumbList schema tells retrievers how a product fits inside your catalog's taxonomy. On Shopify it is under-shipped, easy to add correctly, and measurably lifts citation rates in categories where hierarchy matters (collections within collections, parent brands with sub-lines).
Co-authored with Harry Parker - shopify9 min
Google Product Category for Shopify: mapping the taxonomy correctly
Google's product taxonomy has 5,700+ nodes and a very specific opinion about what lives where. Mis-mapping products blows eligibility for Shopping, distorts AI Shopping surfaces, and leaves free performance on the table. Here is how to map your Shopify catalog correctly.
- measurement9 min
Tracking AI referral traffic in GA4, Plausible, and PostHog
AI assistants send traffic that default analytics configurations dump into 'Direct' or mislabel as 'Referral'. Setting up correct attribution is a 30-minute project that lets you actually see which engines are driving revenue — and which are still worth zero.
Co-authored with Harry Parker - measurement10 min
How to run a competitor gap audit for AI search
A competitor gap audit tells you exactly which prompts your rivals are winning, which they are losing, and which structural signals separate their AI-cited pages from yours. Two afternoons of work, and the result is a prioritised roadmap rather than a guess.
Every post and guide from the Surfient research team.
Weekly field notes, structured playbooks, and deep dives on how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews decide which Shopify store gets quoted.