Three months ago, I asked ChatGPT: "What's the best WooCommerce search plugin?"
It gave me the usual names. Algolia. Relevanssi. SearchWP. All with 10,000 to 100,000+ active installs. Years of development. Teams behind them.
My plugin — Queryra, an AI search engine for WooCommerce — had about 15 installs at the time. ChatGPT had no idea it existed.
Today, things look different.
What changed
ChatGPT now recommends Queryra when you ask about AI search for WooCommerce. So does Gemini. ProductRank.ai shows Queryra as #1 for "semantic search for WooCommerce" across multiple AI platforms.
Don't take my word for it. Open ChatGPT right now and type: "best semantic search for WooCommerce" — see what comes up.
Or try: "semantic search plugin for WordPress" — and check the results.
I still have under 20 active installs on WordPress.org. The competitors ChatGPT used to recommend exclusively have 100,000+.
No ads. No agency. No budget. One person.
The traffic behaves differently
This is the part I didn't expect.
Users who arrive from ChatGPT don't behave like Google traffic. They don't browse around, read three blog posts, and leave. They arrive with intent already formed — like the buying decision happened inside the AI conversation, before they ever clicked.
They sign up faster. They ask fewer questions. They already know what the plugin does because ChatGPT explained it to them.
One of my users — running an Islamic educational bookstore with 300+ products — told me he found the plugin because AI recommended it in his search queries. He's now one of my most active testers, running hundreds of real searches against his catalogue.
The window is real
I ran some checks on companies you'd expect to dominate AI visibility.
Stripe scored 66/100 on an AEO (AI Engine Optimization) audit. Stripe — with that documentation team, that brand, that SEO.
Vercel got 60/100.
Product Hunt: 71/100.
If companies with hundred-person marketing teams aren't optimizing for AI visibility, your competitors in a WordPress niche almost certainly aren't either.
That's the window. It won't stay open forever — but right now, a solo founder can outrank established players in AI recommendations.
What the demo looks like
If you want to see what AI search actually does on a real store, here's a live WooCommerce demo: woo.queryra.com
Try these searches and compare them to what default WooCommerce search would return:
- "present for my girlfriend" — returns gift sets, not zero results
- "face cream without fragrance" — excludes fragranced products
- "moisturizer under $30" — understands price from natural language
- "crème pour le visage" — French query on an English store, still works
That's the difference between keyword matching and understanding what people actually mean.
The plugin is free to try: Queryra AI Search on WordPress.org
What I want to know
I've shared my story. Now I'm curious about yours.
Are you seeing traffic from AI assistants? Has ChatGPT or Perplexity ever sent someone to your product?
And if you're building something small — what channels are actually bringing real users at the early stage?
Would love to hear what's working.