Perplexity answers shopping questions from a merged graph: scraped product pages, merchant-submitted feeds, and review aggregators. When the three disagree, the feed usually wins.
We reverse-engineered 300 shopping answers and matched each cited claim to its likeliest source layer. Availability and price came from feeds in 81% of cases. The qualitative claims came from editorial reviews, not from the merchant.
On the generative web, your product feed is a ranking document.
If you sell online and have not submitted a feed, scraped copies of your pages are negotiating on your behalf.