How LLMs read products
When a shopper asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini for a product recommendation, the model doesn't scroll your website. It queries a catalog index — a structured representation of products, scored by semantic relevance to the query.
The quality of that representation decides whether you appear.
What LLMs look for
- Clear semantic identity — one sentence answering "what is this product and who is it for?". Vague titles ("SKU-23487 · Premium Item") are skipped.
- Structured attributes — material, use case, size, season, audience. JSON-LD is the preferred format.
- Bilingual keywords — people ask in the language they think in. EN + ES coverage doubles your reach in Spanish-speaking markets.
- Reasoning — why should someone buy this vs the alternatives? When is it the right choice?
- Signals of quality — reviews, returns rate, certifications. Currently hard to acquire at scale, but improving.
llms.txt— a tenant-level manifest telling crawlers what your catalog offers and where to find structured data.- Markdown endpoints — clean text/markdown representations of products and entities. Sites exposing structured content as markdown score higher on Cloudflare's agent-readiness metric.
What Clione does about each
| LLM need | Clione artifact |
|---|---|
| Semantic identity | core_identity text |
| Structured attributes | synthetic_properties JSON + JSON-LD |
| Bilingual keywords | search_keywords[] (EN + ES) |
| Reasoning | reasoning.{recommended_for, decision_logic, objection_handler} |
| Quality signals | Quality scores (⚠ currently LLM-inferred — see Quality Scores) |
| Catalog manifest | /.well-known/llms.txt served per-tenant |
| Markdown for crawlers | .md endpoints on every entity (text/markdown) |
Why the traditional SEO stack isn't enough
Keyword stuffing, backlink farming, exact-match titles — these assume a keyword-matching crawler. LLMs use embeddings: they compare the meaning of the query against the meaning of your product text. Well-written product identity beats aggressive SEO copy every time.
That's the whole bet of Clione: enrich once, serve semantically, win the LLM channel.
It's not just products
Every entity in your catalog — products, collections, categories, and pages — gets the full signal treatment. The same four signal formats (.jsonld, .llm, .md, .meta) are available for all entity types. Collections get CollectionPage schema, categories get their own JSON-LD, pages get WebPage schema. All bundled with FAQPage if FAQ entries exist. All with markdown for Cloudflare agent-readiness. The LLM doesn't just see your products — it sees your entire store's semantic structure.