Why does AI link to resellers or marketplaces instead of my site?

Three things push AI engines toward resellers and marketplaces.

• Prominence. Large sites dominate citations. A study of AI search citing patterns (arXiv 2507.05301, data from March to May 2025) found the top 20 news sources accounted for 67.3% of all citations for OpenAI models. That study covered news, but the pattern of concentration on big domains is the strongest association in the evidence. A marketplace listing inherits that prominence.
• Access. If an AI crawler cannot fetch your product page, or fetches it and finds an empty shell, the engine has nothing of yours to retrieve. The reseller page, served as plain HTML, wins by default.
• Clarity. A listing that states price, specs and availability in plain text gives the engine a sentence it can quote. A brand page with the price behind a configurator does not.

You can't change the first. You can fix the second, and you can improve the third. That's the order to work in.

Before blaming prominence, rule out the failures that make your site invisible. These are checkable, and each one is a complete block.

JavaScript-only content

Vercel's crawler study found ChatGPT and Claude crawlers fetch JavaScript files but don't execute them, so they can't read client-side rendered content. Googlebot does render, so this gap mainly affects non-Google engines. If your price, model names or specs appear only after hydration, compare the raw HTML with the rendered page.

robots.txt rules per bot

OpenAI states each crawler setting is independent. GPTBot governs training. OAI-SearchBot controls whether you appear in ChatGPT search. A blanket AI block removes search eligibility too. A setup that opts out of training but stays in search looks like this:

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

Firewall or CDN blocks

A bot-management rule can return 403 to a crawler that robots.txt allows. Nothing in your analytics will flag it. If crawlers hit your server but citations never follow, see why AI crawlers visit but never cite. The AI Crawler Checker requests a page as each AI crawler and shows which ones get turned away.

Google eligibility

For AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google says a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet. A stray noindex or nosnippet on product templates removes you from those answers.

The honest picture is narrower than most GEO advice suggests.

• A critical survey of 45 GEO studies (arXiv 2607.14035, July 2026) concluded that content already retrieved can change how it's cited, but no technique shows a stable, cross-platform effect on getting discovered in the first place.
• Engines don't search your customer's exact words. OpenAI says ChatGPT search typically rewrites a query into one or more targeted queries. You can't see which pages those queries return.
• A citation is not the whole story. Engines retrieve more pages than they cite, so a reseller link in the answer doesn't mean your page was never read. The difference is explained in cited vs retrieved sources.

What this means: no markup, phrasing trick or page length moves you ahead of a marketplace. Being reachable and stating facts plainly are the levers with support behind them. When engines cite other sites, being accurately represented on those sites is the route into the answer. That's an association, not a promised effect, and third-party mentions in AI answers covers it in more depth.

When a reseller citation is fine

If the listing is accurate and the buyer can purchase there, a reseller citation still names your product. The risk isn't the link. It's the content behind it.

When the listing is wrong

AI platforms get specific facts wrong about specific brands. An outdated marketplace price, a discontinued model, or a third-party seller's loose description can be quoted as fact. Treat every listing you control as a page an engine may read.

Engines behave differently

Google's AI features draw on Google's index. Copilot grounds on Bing. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity use their own crawlers and search partners. A reseller can dominate one engine while your site appears in another, so check each separately rather than trusting one blended number. If you run a marketplace yourself, the dynamics flip, and AI visibility for online marketplaces covers that side.

1. Check access on your product pages. Confirm robots.txt allows OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot, and that your firewall returns 200 to them.
2. Put load-bearing facts in the raw HTML. Price, model names, specs, availability and a one-line description should be present before JavaScript runs.
3. Check Google eligibility. Look for noindex, nosnippet or max-snippet:0 on product templates. Google's own path is covered in getting cited in AI Overviews and AI Mode.
4. Find the pages engines actually cite. Run your buyer questions and record which reseller and marketplace URLs appear. The playbook on finding the third-party pages AI engines cite walks through it.
5. Audit those listings for accuracy. Fix prices, specs and product names that you control. Ask resellers to correct the ones you don't.
6. Recheck after changes. Engines update on their own schedule, and as of October 2026 none publishes a ranking position you can track.