Prominence-Stratified Failure Modes in Retrieval-Augmented Commercial Recommendation: A 37,000-Run Audit

ArXi:2605.27439v1 Announce Type: cross AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude are recommendation engines, not search engines: they answer commercial queries by directly nominating brands rather than returning a list of links. Marketing to AI is therefore a broader problem than "show up in search" -- positioning, content, and product fit matter as much as discoverability.