Description
Your next customer is asking AI what to buy.
When a shopper asks an AI assistant for the best product in your category, the answer names a handful of products, and every other store is invisible. AnswerEng for WooCommerce shows you whether your products make it into those answers, how you compare with your competitors, and what to change when you’re missing.
How it works
- Connect. Paste your free AnswerEng API key into WooCommerce AnswerEng Settings, and add your brand and competitor names.
- Sync. Your published catalog syncs to AnswerEng in the background and stays current as you edit products.
- Measure. AnswerEng asks AI answer engines the buying questions your shoppers ask, and records which products come back recommended.
- Improve. Results appear right in wp-admin, with drafted fixes for the questions where your products were missing.
What you’ll see
- Overall visibility: how often AI answer engines recommend your products, with a confidence interval so you know how solid the number is.
- Per-engine presence: results for each engine AnswerEng samples, currently Claude, Perplexity, Mistral, and Llama.
- Visibility trend: whether you’re gaining or losing ground from run to run.
- Share of voice: how often you’re recommended compared with the competitors you name.
- Drafted fixes: for each question you were missing from, a diagnosis and a ready-to-copy draft. You review and apply them yourself; nothing on your store changes automatically.
Honest numbers, not hype
AI answers vary from one ask to the next, so a single chatbot conversation proves very little. AnswerEng reports every visibility number with a 95% confidence interval: a narrow range means a solid result, and a wide one means the picture is still forming.
Built for store owners
- Works with your existing WooCommerce catalog. No theme edits and no changes to your products.
- Syncs in the background with WooCommerce’s Action Scheduler, and caches results so admin pages stay fast.
- Sends product data only, never customer or order data. See “External services” below for exactly what is sent and when.
- Compatible with WooCommerce High-Performance Order Storage and block-based cart and checkout.
Plans
An AnswerEng account is required. The Free plan covers one store and 10 monitored questions, sampled monthly, with no payment card needed: sign up at answereng.io/signup and your API key arrives by email. Paid plans add weekly sampling, more questions, and more stores. See pricing.
External services
This plugin relies on AnswerEng, a hosted service operated by Fullspec Studio LLC. By default it connects to the AnswerEng API (https://api.answereng.io); if you enter a different Engine URL on the settings page, it connects to that address instead. It contacts only that one endpoint, and only in these situations:
- On catalog sync — when a product changes (if auto-sync is enabled) or on the nightly reconcile, the plugin sends the following data for each published product to the endpoint’s
/catalogroute, so it can be analyzed by AI answer engines: product SKU, title, short description, price, category, and attributes. It also sends your store key (by default, your site’s domain name), your brand names (by default, your site title), and your configured competitor names. No product images and no customer or order data are ever transmitted. - On results viewing — when you open the AnswerEng results page, or click “Test connection” / “Refresh”, the plugin requests your visibility summary and drafted fixes from the endpoint.
Every request is authenticated with the API key you entered. There is no telemetry, tracking, or third-party analytics of any kind.
AnswerEng Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
Screenshots
Installation
- Install the plugin from Plugins Add New Plugin (search for “AnswerEng”), or upload the zip via Plugins Add New Plugin Upload Plugin.
- Activate the plugin. WooCommerce must already be active — if it isn’t, you’ll see an admin notice until it is.
- Sign up at answereng.io/signup (free tier available). Your API key arrives by email.
- Go to WooCommerce AnswerEng Settings (or click Settings under the plugin on the Plugins screen), paste your API key, and click Save. Brand names default to your site title, the store key to your site’s domain, and a blank Engine URL uses AnswerEng’s hosted service. Add competitor names to see share of voice.
- Click the sync status pill at the top of the AnswerEng screens, then Sync now, to send your catalog. Turn on auto-sync to keep it current as you edit products; otherwise the catalog syncs nightly.
- Click “Test connection” to confirm the plugin can reach AnswerEng.
- Visit WooCommerce AnswerEng to view visibility results after your first sampling run.
The full setup guide is at answereng.io/docs/get-started.
FAQ
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Test connection says AnswerEng has no catalog for my store yet. Is something wrong?
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No. Your API key works; AnswerEng creates your store when it receives your first catalog sync. Click the sync status pill, then Sync now, and the message goes away once the sync completes.
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How does catalog sync work?
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Each sync sends your whole published catalog to AnswerEng, replacing the previous copy, so AnswerEng always works from your current products. With auto-sync on, a sync runs about five minutes after you change a product, and changes made close together are combined into one sync. A nightly sync also runs to catch anything missed. You can start a sync at any time with “Sync now” from the sync status pill.
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Which AI engines does AnswerEng check?
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AnswerEng currently samples Claude, Perplexity, Mistral, and Llama. Every plan includes all of them.
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Is there a limit on how many products can be synced?
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Yes. A single sync push covers up to 5,000 published products. If your catalog exceeds that limit, the sync is refused rather than sent partially — you’ll see a “product sync limit exceeded” entry in the sync log and an admin notice, and no catalog push will happen until the product count is back under the limit.
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Why does “Test connection” or the results page say the engine may be “waking up”?
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AnswerEng’s database pauses after a period of inactivity and takes a few seconds to resume on the next request. If a request to the engine fails, the plugin automatically retries once before reporting an error, and the message you see explicitly says the engine may be waking up and suggests trying again in about 20 seconds. This is expected after a quiet period, not a misconfiguration — if it persists after a couple of tries, double-check your API key (and your Engine URL, if you set one).
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What happens if a sync fails?
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Failed syncs are retried automatically (up to 3 attempts, with a short backoff) before being marked failed. Every attempt — success, retry, skip, refusal, or failure — is recorded in the rolling sync log (the last 20 entries) on the settings page, and a failing sync surfaces an admin notice pointing you to that log.
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Does this plugin send data anywhere besides AnswerEng?
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No. See “External services” above — the only outbound requests this plugin makes are to the AnswerEng API (or the Engine URL you set instead).
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What happens to my data if I uninstall the plugin?
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Uninstalling removes all plugin settings, the sync log, the sync-failure notice flag, cached results transients, and any scheduled sync actions. It does not delete your data from AnswerEng — that is managed from your AnswerEng account.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“AnswerEng for WooCommerce” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
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Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
0.3.5
- The “requires WooCommerce” notice shows only on the Plugins screen, to users who can activate plugins.
- The results screen’s first-run footer now says plainly that only product data is sent to AnswerEng.
0.3.4
- “Get an API key” links open the answereng.io sign-up page.
0.3.3
- Easier first run: brand names default to your site title, so a new install can sync with only an API key entered.
- Test connection reports a valid key as connected before the first sync, and says to click Sync now, instead of asking you to re-copy the store key.
- A store with no published products is skipped with a clear sync-log message instead of failing, and skipped syncs say what to fix.
- A Settings link on the Plugins screen, and a one-time prompt after activation pointing to AnswerEng Settings.
- Links to the answereng.io sign-up form and the new setup guide.
0.3.2
- Settings saves are hardened against malformed or tampered form input: a missing or non-array submission keeps your saved settings, non-text values are discarded, and the Engine URL accepts only http and https.
0.3.1
- The plugin no longer contacts AnswerEng until an API key is entered. Test connection without a key now explains what to do instead of sending a request.
0.3.0
- Works with AnswerEng’s hosted service out of the box: leave Engine URL blank to use AnswerEng cloud (https://api.answereng.io); the store key defaults to your site’s domain. Settings list the API key first.
- Declares compatibility with WooCommerce High-Performance Order Storage and block-based cart/checkout, and requires WooCommerce via the Requires Plugins header.
- Text domain is now answereng-for-woocommerce, matching the WordPress.org slug.
- Bundled font license files (SIL Open Font License) are now included.
- Tested with WordPress 7.1 and WooCommerce 11.1.
0.2.3
- First-run onboarding: the results page now guides unconfigured installs to enter an API key, and the settings screen links key-less installs to answereng.io (free tier available). Copy no longer assumes a self-hosted engine.
0.2.2
- Test connection now distinguishes a rejected API key and an unknown store key from an unreachable (waking) engine.
- Trashing a product now triggers auto-sync; trash/untrash hooks act only on products (previously untrash fired for every post type).
- Sync log and failure-notice options no longer autoload on every page load.
- Unconfigured installs keep a single “skipped” log entry instead of one per nightly reconcile.
0.2.1
- Update support for directly distributed copies (not used by WordPress.org installs).
0.2.0
- Redesigned admin UI from the AnswerEng brand system: dashboard with hero visibility stat and confidence-interval glyph, SVG trend chart with CI band, per-engine and share-of-voice bars, drafted-fix review cards; settings as sectioned cards with tag inputs, a sync toggle, and a data-disclosure panel; sync-status pill with detail popover and branded admin notices. Fonts are bundled locally — the plugin still makes no external requests other than to your configured engine.
0.1.0
- Initial release: settings screen, debounced catalog sync with retry and a rolling log, connection test, and a results page showing visibility, trend, share of voice, and drafted fixes.