AI-to-retail routing intelligence · for footwear and wellness brands with DTC + retail
When AI recommends running shoes, who gets the cart?
Runner's World and RunRepeat are the only two third-party publishers that appear in the top-10 citation lists on both AI trackers we compared. Across 7.73M outbound links, they route the same demand in almost opposite ways — and only one of them ever sends it to a brand.
Works with the Profound, Semrush, Similarweb or Ahrefs data you already pay for. No tags. No pixels. No platform replacement. Commerce Graph Method v1.2.
01 · The proof in footwear & wellness
Three numbers from this category's benchmark.
98.6%
of RunRepeat's outbound is commercial
44.0% goes to Amazon and 40.9% into affiliate networks. It is a routing engine, not a magazine.
86.6%
of Runner's World outbound stays inside the Hearst graph
Only 3.1% is commercial at all — so the citations that reach it rarely convert anywhere you can see.
#2 of 64
Adidas rank in AI answers, on both trackers
48% visibility on Gumshoe, 49% on Profound — behind Nike, and still not the destination the clicks reach.
Observed: link paths, affiliate wrappers, merchant destinations. Modeled: value at risk and share of clicks. We label which is which.
Read the full running publisher teardown02 · What we analysed
Named brands, named publishers, resolved destinations.
Brands analysed
- Nike
- Adidas
- Brooks
- Hoka
- New Balance
- Asics
- Saucony
- On Running
Publishers analysed
- Runner's World
- RunRepeat
- Outside
- Believe in the Run
- Road Runner Sports
Destinations that captured the demand
- Amazon
- Dick's Sporting Goods
- Road Runner Sports
- Zappos
- Foot Locker
What we look at first for you
- 01
Which of the two publisher models your citations actually sit on, and what each one does with the click
- 02
Where Amazon and the big sporting-goods retailers intercept demand ahead of your own site
- 03
Which review and roundup formats convert citation weight into brand-direct traffic in this category
03 · Built for one job, and one buyer
Built for one job, and one buyer.
If your category has one route to purchase, you do not need us. Aqxle earns its fee where demand can land in four different places.
This is for you if:
- You run ecommerce, digital commerce or DTC P&L at a consumer brand doing $100M–$2B
- You sell through your own site AND Amazon AND at least two specialty or big-box retailers
- You have an active affiliate or digital PR program
- Someone has asked you what AI search is doing to your channel mix, and the honest answer is that nobody knows
- You already pay for an AI visibility tracker and it still cannot tell you what share of your AI-cited demand ends up at amazon.com versus your own site
This is not for you if:
- You are DTC-only with no retail or marketplace presence
- You are B2B SaaS or a local service business
- You have exclusive-retail distribution you cannot change
- You want prompt tracking and mention share — buy Semrush or Profound, they are better at it and cheaper
- You want a dashboard rather than a decision
Who we talk to
Economic buyer
VP Ecommerce · VP Digital Commerce · GM DTC · Chief Digital Officer
Owns the channel mix question.
Problem owner
Director of SEO / Organic Growth / GEO / Digital Shelf
Sees the citations, cannot change the routing.
Action owner
Director of Affiliate & Partnerships · Digital PR · Retail Media
Makes the fix once the gap is named.
05 · How it works
Six layers. One question: where does the demand actually land?
Powered by Profound, Gumshoe, SEMrush — or your stack
Visibility share
Share of voice on AI answer pages across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude.
Citation sources
Which URLs the model picked — and which it ignored.
Prompt intent
Research, comparison, deals, purchase. TOFU / MOFU / BOFU split.
URL-level crawl
What each cited page links out to — Amazon, affiliate networks, retailers, DTC.
Path resolution
Where every commercial link finally lands. Affiliate redirect resolved, commission rail tagged.
Merchant Resolution
Final merchant named, commission rail tagged, destination scored against your preferred-channel list.
You tell us which destinations you prefer. Amazon is not automatically leakage — a wholesale sale can be the better sale. We measure preferred-destination capture, not DTC ideology.
We ingest visibility data from AI monitoring platforms — Profound, Gumshoe, and SEMrush today, or whatever you already run — crawl what AI-cited pages link out to (Amazon, retailers, DTC, affiliate networks), and apply the Aqxle Path Resolution layer to see where every commercial link finally lands and which commission rail captured it. We're provider-agnostic by design and constantly testing new sources — if you've already standardized on a tracker, we plug into it instead of asking you to switch.
Aqxle sits on top of your existing stack — no tags, pixels, or rip-and-replace required.
05 · The offer
The offer
Design Partner Audit
First 3 brands only$5,000
15 business days
- One brand, four competitors, one US category
- 100 high-intent prompts across up to four answer engines
- Top 50 AI-influential cited pages
- Up to 1,500 unique commercial links resolved to final merchant
- Merchant and affiliate-network map
- Your preferred destinations and contribution assumptions applied
- Low / base / high modeled value-at-risk range
- 10 prioritized publisher, affiliate and retail actions
- 60-minute executive workshop and 90-day test plan
If we cannot surface at least three material routing opportunities you did not already know about and agree are actionable, we refund half. In exchange we ask for data access, two stakeholder interviews and permission to publish an anonymized case study.
Standard Audit
$10,000–$15,000
15 business days
- Same deliverable, up to three brands or markets. Priced by category breadth and geography.
Continuous Routing Intelligence
from $36,000 / year
- One brand, category and market
- Quarterly routing refresh
- Monthly change alerts when a cited page changes its destination
- Two executive reviews per year
- Portfolio packages $60k–$90k
Your standard audit fee is credited in full against an annual contract signed within 30 days.
Why we charge for the first look: a free audit tells us nothing about whether you can act on it. The fee is the qualification.
Your audit is delivered privately. We publish benchmarks, never client diagnostics.