ABOUT · VIREN INANIYAN
Viren Inaniyan
Co-founder & CEO of Tru Commerce (formerly Asva AI). Building the commerce infrastructure layer for AI agents — so brands stay the merchant of record as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Rufus, Copilot, and Claude become the storefront.
Focus
I started Asva AI in 2024 as a measurement layer for AI Share of Voice — the discipline the industry now calls AEO. It worked. Amazon India moved +0.98 SoV points in six weeks. ITC MasterChef moved +89% relative SoV in thirty days. House of Zelena went from #6 to #1 across three LLMs in six months. MyMuse discovered 7× the AI-driven revenue GA4 was reporting.
Every one of those customers told us the same thing on the follow-up call: “We can see the gap now. We don’t have a way to close it.”
Measurement is half the work. Closing the loop — catalogs an agent can read, checkout an agent can complete, attribution that survives the agent path — is the other half. Nobody was building the other half as a category. So we did.
Tru Commerce is the platform for that closing work. One integration connects a brand’s catalog to every major agent surface. The brand stays the merchant of record. The customer relationship stays with the brand. The transaction closes inside the agent.
I write about this weekly in Insights. If you want to talk about how any of this applies to your brand, the fastest path is a free Citation Rank scan or a direct email at [email protected].
Recent writing
What I’ve been publishing
Aug 7, 2026
Query Fan-Out: One Question Becomes 5-7 Searches (And ChatGPT Rewrites All of Them)
A user typed 'ALTRR Portable Spice Mill (200W)' into ChatGPT. The shopping backend searched 'portable spice grinder travel' — brand stripped, spec dropped, intent added. That rewrite is stamped into every card's payload as generated_product_query, and it is only one branch of a fan-out that turns a single buyer question into 5-7 sub-queries across 8 distinct axes. Classical SEO optimizes one keyword per page. AI shopping ranks you across the whole fan-out — which is exactly why Amazon holds 63-79% presence on every sub-intent type we measure.
Aug 7, 2026
The 86% Rule — In AI Shopping, Eligibility Beats Ranking
When a retailer product page gets cited in a ChatGPT shopping answer, it wins the top recommendation slot 86.03% of the time — the highest hit rate of any content type in an 18,942-citation dataset. But retailer pages are only 8.28% of what ChatGPT cites. That inversion rewrites the whole playbook: the scarce, high-conversion battle in AI shopping is getting cited at all, not ranking once cited. Here are the three gates that decide citation eligibility — reviews, product-type fit, sub-intent presence — and the two beloved PDP levers that tested statistically dead.
Aug 7, 2026
AI Visibility Has Two Layers: The Placement vs Citation Dashboard That Actually Works
AI shopping answers have two independent layers — the products the model recommends (placement) and the sources it attributes the answer to (citation) — and every brand's AI-visibility dashboard is quietly blending them into one number that lies. On Amazon's India mixer-grinder data, one layer is 61.48% and the other is 0.78% — a 79× gap. On sunscreens the same structural pattern holds at 25×. And both layers moved in opposite directions twice in eight months. Here is the four-KPI-group model that fixes it.
Aug 7, 2026
The Amazon Shelf Story: What Really Happened to Amazon in ChatGPT Shopping Between May and July 2026
Everyone screenshotted the May chart: Amazon's ChatGPT presence rose to 96% while its citation rate collapsed to 1.91%. Two months later, on the exact same 425 buyer prompts, both metrics reversed — and the popular narrative got the story completely wrong. The 96% was on a half-empty shelf (56% zero-card responses). The July shelf is about three times healthier. And Amazon still wins the top-2 slot plus cheapest price on 210 of those 425 prompts. Here is the reverse-engineered version of what actually moved.
Aug 7, 2026
Inside chatgpt.com/shopping: A 200-Query Teardown of OpenAI's Real Commerce Stack
We ran 200 buyer queries against ChatGPT's dedicated shopping surface, captured every response payload, and reverse-engineered the plumbing. A hidden GPT-5.3 handles 56% of shopping queries. Fifteen direct feed partners power the carousel — Amazon isn't one, and still owns the single badge OpenAI ships. Ads run through Criteo. Every image is face-detected. Here's what a teardown of the payload actually reveals.
Jul 26, 2026
AI Commerce Conversion Rate: The 15.9% vs 1.76% Stat, Explained
ChatGPT-referred shoppers convert at 15.9% versus 1.76% for Google (Adobe, 2025). Here's what's actually driving that gap — and why it doesn't mean what a lot of decks imply.
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