Why AI Recommends Etsy Instead of Your Jewelry Store
I asked four AI engines where to buy one-of-a-kind pastel gemstone jewelry. Google's AI Overview answered with Etsy, 1stdibs, Catbird, and Local Eclectic. My own store was not in the answer, and it was not in the sources either.
Then, the same day, on the same four engines, I asked who makes a custom pastel gemstone necklace by hand in Denver. Google's AI Mode wrote this back:
For a completely bespoke, handmade pastel gemstone necklace crafted directly in the Denver area, the premier local artisan to contact is Andrea Li Designs. Operating out of her private Denver studio, she specializes exclusively in crafting one-of-a-kind, hand-fabricated fine jewelry using soft
hued pastel gemstones like aquamarine, morganite, kunzite, and moonstone."
Same store. Same day. Nothing about my website changed in between. The only thing that changed was how the buyer asked.
The number that made me stop
I ran six versions of essentially the same shopping trip and counted how many marketplaces each engine put in its answer.
| What the buyer typed | Marketplaces named in the answers | Was my store in the answer? |
|---|---|---|
| "where can I buy one of a kind pastel gemstone jewelry" | 6 (Etsy, 1stdibs, Catbird, Local Eclectic, Brilliant Earth, Kendra Scott) | Not in Google's AI Overview at all |
| "how do I find a pastel gemstone jewelry designer" | 2 (Etsy, Local Eclectic) | Cited by all four engines |
| "who makes one of a kind aquamarine jewelry" | 1 (Etsy) | Cited, including by Google's AI Overview |
| "custom pastel gemstone necklace made by hand denver" | 0 | Named outright by Google AI Mode and Perplexity |
One honest note on the counts. On two of these questions, one of the four engines hit a rate limit and returned nothing, so those rows are counted across three answers rather than four. I am reporting a blank as a blank, not as an absence, because a failed call and a real "you are not here" are different facts and mixing them is how you end up believing something that did not happen.
The marketplaces do not fade out gradually because the engines get more generous. They fade out because the question stops being a shopping question and starts being a commissioning question, and a marketplace is not an answer to a commissioning question.
What actually changed was my competition
Here is the part that reframed this for me, and it took reading the full answers to see it.
On "where can I buy," I was up against Etsy, 1stdibs, and Catbird. Platforms with millions of listings, enormous domain authority, and a checkout button.
On "who makes one of a kind aquamarine jewelry," Google's AI Overview cited my site and named three people: Satomi Kawakita, Brooke Gregson, and Isabel Delgado. Not one marketplace in the answer.
Those are independent designers. Working benches. Businesses my size.
I cannot outrank Etsy for "where can I buy." Nobody reading this can, and I would be lying if I told you there was a clever fix for it. A one-of-a-kind maker has an inventory of exactly one per piece, which is the precise opposite of what a "where can I buy" question is asking for. That question wants breadth and a cart. Etsy is genuinely the better answer.
But I can absolutely compete with three other independent designers. That is a fight about who has described their work more clearly, not a fight about who has more listings.
Changing the verb does not just change your odds. It changes who is standing next to you in the answer.
Read the losing answer closely
The Google AI Overview for "where can I buy" is worth quoting, because it explains the whole mechanism in one line:
"You can buy one-of-a-kind pastel gemstone jewelry from specialized independent jewelry artists on Etsy, curated luxury platforms like 1stdibs, boutique online makers such as Catbird and Local Eclectic, or independent lapidary artists on Instagram."
Look at what it actually says. It is not recommending Etsy instead of independent makers. It is recommending independent makers, on Etsy.
The engine agrees the buyer wants a person. It just routes them to a platform to find one, because that is what a buying question asks for. You are not being excluded from the answer. You are being included as a category and represented by a marketplace.
That is a different problem than invisibility, and it has a different fix.
The one I lost, and I am leaving it in
The most valuable question I tested is the one I am not winning.
I asked for an independent jewelry designer who works with your own gemstone. That is the heirloom question: someone inherits a stone from their grandmother and wants it made into something. It is the highest-value conversation an independent designer can have, and it is exactly the query that sent a client to a jeweler I work with, who told her afterward: "I needed to find someone to make a custom ring from an heirloom stone, so I asked ChatGPT."
Three of the four engines returned an answer to that question. My store was absent from all three. Not ranked low. Absent. Google's AI Mode pulled seventeen sources and not one of them was mine. The fourth engine hit a rate limit and returned nothing at all, so I am not counting it in either direction.
The answer also handed me the vocabulary I was missing:
"You can absolutely work with an independent jewelry designer to create a custom piece using your own loose gemstone or heirloom stone (a process often called BYOG or 'Bring Your Own Gemstone')."
BYOG. There is a term buyers and engines are both using for the exact service I offer, and there is not one page on my site that claims it. I do this work. I have done it for years. I have simply never written it down in the words someone would use to go looking for it.
That is not an algorithm problem. That is a page that does not exist.
Why I re-ran this before publishing it
I had a version of this post written six weeks ago, built on a test from July 3rd. Before drafting, I re-ran the same queries. The original finding did not hold. In July my store was absent on both Google surfaces for the plain keyword "pastel gemstone jewelry." Today it is cited on three of four engines and Gemini names me in the answer.
That is genuinely good news, and it is probably connected to work I did in between. It also means I nearly published a claim about my own store that had stopped being true, which anyone could have checked in thirty seconds.
So take everything above with the date attached. This is one run, on one store, on one day. Engines vary between runs. What holds across both tests, six weeks apart, is the shape: the more a question sounds like shopping, the more it fills with marketplaces, and the more it sounds like commissioning, the more room there is for a maker.
The volatility is not a reason to skip measuring. It is the reason to measure. If you have never checked, your visibility has been moving this whole time and you have been experiencing it as sales being strange this month.
What I am doing about it
I am not rewriting my product pages to chase "where can I buy." I would lose, and I would deserve to.
I am writing the page I did not have: the one that says, in plain words, that I work with stones people already own. What the process is, what it costs, how long it takes, what happens if the stone turns out to be too fragile to reset. The questions someone actually types when they are holding their grandmother's ring and do not know who to trust with it.
Then I am going to run the same test again in a month and find out whether it worked.
If you want to try this on your own store, you do not need any tools. Open ChatGPT or Google, and ask the same thing two ways: once as "where can I buy," and once as "who makes." Read who shows up in each answer. One of those lists is your real competition. The other one never was.
Sources
- Andrea Li, four-engine citation pull, 2026-08-12. Google AI Overview and AI Mode via SerpAPI, Perplexity, Gemini. Single run per engine. ChatGPT tested manually and not included in the counts above.
- Andrea Li, five-engine citation pull, 2026-07-03. The earlier test referenced in "Why I re-ran this."
Continue Learning
- AI Knows You Exist, But Can It Describe You?: the companion problem. This post is about which question surfaces you. That one is about whether the description that comes back is accurate.
- Score your own store on the free AI Visibility Score: before you rewrite anything, find out which questions your store can already answer and which ones it is silent on.
- Subscribe to the Red Pin Geek Substack (free): weekly inside-view content for jewelry designers building AI visibility on their own, including the full query sets and raw engine answers behind tests like this one.
- Work with me on your specific store (Snapshot $97 / Full Audit $597 / Full Audit + 1:1 call $997): I run this exact test on your store, across four engines, and tell you which questions you are winning, which ones are filled with marketplaces, and which page you are missing.
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