Klota Study: 1 in 4 Small Swedish Shops Unseen by ChatGPT

KLOTA, a Swedish agency that sells AI visibility services, has published a study finding that about one in four small Swedish online shops does not show up when ChatGPT or Claude answer buying questions in Swedish. The agency paid for the study itself and says openly that it has an interest in the result. Ehandel.se reported the findings on 6 November, and KLOTA's own Swedish-language page is dated 7 November 2026.

KLOTA's head, Anders Karlsson, ran the stores through the agency's AI visibility analysis, version 2.3, on 4 November 2026. The sample covers Swedish stores with annual revenue of SEK 3 million to 30 million that show Swedish text and prices in kronor. For each store, a language model wrote three Swedish buying questions based on the store's home page, without naming the store. Those questions were put to Claude (Sonnet 5.5) and ChatGPT (chat-latest), both with web search turned on. That gave six answers per store and 1,123 answers in total, according to KLOTA.

The study has clear limits. It is a single measurement taken on one day, and KLOTA notes that AI answers vary between runs and that answers through the API may differ from those in the consumer apps. The links it reports between a store's text and its visibility do not show cause. The source for this account also calculated a 4.3x ratio and an 8-point gap from KLOTA's figures, but the details of those comparisons are not given in the material available here.

The finding matters for small retailers in the Nordics because AI assistants are becoming a place where shoppers ask for product recommendations, and a store that never appears in those answers misses that route to customers. The study gives an early, if commercially motivated, measure of how common that problem is among smaller Swedish shops.