Why we're building Selix

I've spent more than 20 years helping companies grow. I built implementation frameworks for SaaS startups, bootstrapped three marketing agencies, went through 500 Startups, and led marketing at a fintech company. More recently, I've been doing marketing for ecommerce stores like ADAS Depot.

That last part is where Selix started.

The question every store owner is starting to ask

Shoppers have changed how they look for things. Instead of typing a few keywords into Google and clicking through a page of links, more of them ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity a full question and get one answer back. Sometimes that answer names your store. Sometimes it doesn't.

Working with stores, I kept running into the same wall. I had no good way to see what AI was saying about them, and no easy way to change it. I needed a tool for this, so I went looking for one.

Why AI visibility tools are built for B2B, not ecommerce

What I found was a crowded category, and nearly all of it pointed in the same direction. Most AI visibility tools, especially the ones raising venture money, are built for B2B software companies.

That makes sense on paper. But B2B is a hard place to prove anything. Sales cycles are long. A deal touches a lot of people and a lot of channels before it closes. When the revenue finally shows up, it's a little fuzzy who or what earned it.

Ecommerce is black and white. A shopper asks a question, lands on your store, and places an order. We can see when that order happened and where it came from. If AI sent a shopper to ADAS Depot and they bought something, that isn't a guess. It's an order number.

That is a better place to build. It's also where almost nobody was building.

Scoring a store isn't the same as fixing it

The other thing I kept noticing: the tools that exist tend to stop at the score. They give you a visibility number and a chart, and leave you there.

A store owner doesn't need another dashboard to feel bad about. They need to know which shopper questions they're losing, what to write so they start winning them, and whether any of it turned into sales.

So that's what Selix does:

• See the questions shoppers ask AI in your category, and which stores get named across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity.
• Write the FAQs, blog posts and product page content that answer the questions you're losing. You approve everything before it goes live.
• Prove what it earned, by tracing AI-referred visits through to real orders.

Built for any store, not just the big ones

I wanted Selix to be accessible to anyone with a store, not only brands with a marketing team and an agency on retainer. That's why we have a $20 plan, and why I was committed to it from the start.

Getting started is hard. I know, because I've been there. When you run a small store you're doing everything at once, and "figure out AI search" falls to the bottom of the list. A simple tool that tells you where you stand and what to do next would have helped me. I think it will help a lot of other people too.

The same thinking is behind a few other choices. You can run a free check on your store without making an account. We publish what AI recommends by category in the AI Shopping Index, for free. One of the things we care about as a company is that people should be able to learn from us even if they never buy from us.

What comes next

Selix launches October 3. In our launch post I'll introduce the team, share how we built it, and tell you why we picked that date (there's a good story behind it).

If you run an ecommerce store and AI search has been on your mind, I'd love to hear from you. Email me at jenn@withselix.com.

Jenn Starr

Co-founder and CEO, Selix