What's new

AI Commerce Capability, shareable Customer ACO, and stronger discovery evidence

This release separates vendor AI Commerce Capability from Customer ACO with its own dimensions and classification, makes Customer ACO the natural next step from a vendor report with full sharing support, strengthens customer discovery evidence, and fixes several reliability issues in sharing, sign-in and reporting.

• AI Commerce Capability replaces vendor ACO Readiness: six vendor-specific dimensions (AI commerce positioning, machine-readable product and pricing data, API and architecture readiness, agent and assistant support, developer experience, and commerce data quality) scored 0-100
• New five-band classification: Limited, Emerging, Established, Strong, Leading, with a methodology-aware layout in both the full report and shared reports
• Older reports keep their score under an "ACO Readiness (legacy)" label with a clear notice that legacy scores are not comparable to the new scale
• Customer ACO stays a separate assessment for merchant sites, so vendor capability and customer opportunity are never mixed
• Opportunities now render under their true category headings with supporting evidence and a confidence signal, removing duplicated differentiating plays
• Customer ACO evidence lists installations across all versions of a vendor report, with URL normalisation so the same customer is not counted twice
• Password-protected share links work again on the edge runtime after tuning the PBKDF2 iteration count, with existing links still valid
• Share dialog now scrolls its content independently with a sticky footer, so nothing is cut off on smaller screens
• Sign-in password visibility toggle restored after fixing a hydration failure on the auth page, covered by new integration tests
• New Resources article: why every commerce software company needs competitive intelligence in the AI era
• Public content, legal pages and llms.txt aligned with the AI Commerce Capability wording and the 0-100 scale
• Shareable Customer ACO assessments: public links, password protection and email invites, using the same sharing system as vendor reports
• Customer ACO is now recommended directly from a vendor report, with a summary card that deep-links into the workflow with the vendor preselected
• Opportunities tab redesigned to match the Positioning layout: a responsive two-column grid with category headings and supporting evidence
• Stronger customer discovery: technology detections are used as a first-class evidence source alongside vendor pages, deep crawl and third-party web mentions
• Discovery now merges candidates by company domain and name, escalates confidence when independent sources agree, and shows exactly what was checked in each run
• Re-running the vendor capability check keeps the pages you selected
• Customer ACO assessments always target the customer website, never the vendor, with a confirmation step when a website is unknown
• Simpler theme switch and a cleaner mobile header
• Security hardening: stricter content security policy with reporting, tightened crawler access to sensitive paths, and updated dependencies

Fair usage ledger, steadier reports, and sharper social previews

A maintenance release focused on trust and consistency: report allowance is now tracked in an auditable usage ledger, opportunities are compared by theme so version diffs stay meaningful, retrying old failed reports works again, and every public page carries a correct preview image and metadata.

• Auditable usage ledger: report and Customer ACO allowance is recorded as append-only events, so deleting a report no longer restores allowance
• Concurrency-safe quota checks with a per-user lock, preventing simultaneous requests from bypassing limits
• Clearer usage wording throughout: "Free reports used: X of Y" plus a note that deleted reports still count
• Structured opportunity tracking: opportunities now carry theme, category and confidence, and are generated last so they build on the other report sections
• Smarter version comparison: changes are classified as reworded, evidence updated, or materially changed, so small rewordings no longer look like new findings
• Retry on older failed reports works again instead of flipping straight back to failed
• Delete individual report versions, including failed ones, from a version history dialog
• Reports list now opens the latest completed version, with earlier completed versions still reachable
• Social previews restored across all public pages with a commerce.nu hosted preview image
• Server-side rendered public pages, expanded JSON-LD (Article, FAQ, breadcrumbs, Organization), sitemap lastmod, and an updated llms.txt for AI crawlers
• Verified access for major AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and others)
• Resources articles refreshed: staggered publication dates, cleaner punctuation, and stronger internal linking
• GDPR deletion extended to purge usage ledger records alongside all other user data

Launch-ready polish and the Resources Centre

Final round of pre-Live polish: a public Resources Centre, sharper shared reports, deeper UX and accessibility fixes, faster public pages, and stronger security around shared links and GDPR deletion. CommerceSpy is on the doorstep of General Availability.

• New Resources Centre at /resources with five evergreen articles (GEO, AI Visibility, ACO, Competitive Intelligence, AI-driven buying) and anonymized report screenshots
• Shareable Reports upgraded: PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 password hashing, invited-email visibility in the share dialog, wider dialog, light theme by default, executive summary with interactive drill-downs
• Shared report SWOT and ACO views now match the full report — summary donut, dimension scores, radar chart, classification
• Homepage refreshed with the launch headline, live sample report link, and Resources teaser
• Multi-persona UX audit shipped: mobile sign-in, on-blur work-email hint, reset-password footer, tablet TOC, resources in the authenticated sidebar
• Self-healing analysis pipeline: server-side stall detection, client auto-retry, and no more fire-and-forget races on /analyze
• Faster public routes with cache-control headers and lighter marketing pages
• GDPR-compliant user deletion now scrubs email-keyed data (suppressions, email log, beta sessions) across all tables
• Default light theme site-wide with a dark-mode toggle in the header
• Legal pages rewritten: modern Terms of Service and Privacy Policy with subprocessor table and retention periods
• Preparing for Live: expect General Availability shortly, with self-service plans and public pricing to follow

AI engine optimization: evidence-led analysis and reliability

The competitive intelligence engine that powers every CommerceSpy report has been rewritten for tighter evidence handling, clearer error recovery, and more consistent output quality. The new engine keeps analysis anchored to fetched site text, retries gracefully when the AI gateway is under pressure, and normalizes responses more strictly so every report section is predictable and actionable.

• AI analysis engine optimized for evidence-led competitive intelligence
• Explicit site-text ground rules so reports stay anchored to fetched evidence
• 80,000-character site-context truncation for stable, repeatable gateway requests
• Retry logic with exponential backoff for rate limits and transient AI gateway failures
• Clearer error messages for AI rate limits and exhausted credits
• Stricter JSON schema validation, parsing, and normalization
• Improved SWOT scoring with server-recalculated composite overall score
• More precise vendor category classification
• Safer URL/scope normalization and deduplicated report outputs

Beta Tester Program, Shareable Reports, and compliance overhaul

v0.7 Beta introduces the CommerceSpy Beta Tester Program with guided onboarding and structured feedback, launches Shareable Reports with public, password, and email-invite access modes, and lands a broad GDPR, security, and reliability pass across the platform.

• Beta Tester Program at /betatester with access-code gate and 8-step guided onboarding flow
• Beta session persistence with auto-resume by email link and progress sidebar
• "Run the test" step with checklists, examples, and product-feedback multi-select of the tester's real reports
• Sidebar "Beta Feedback" deep link for active testers that jumps straight to the current step
• Admin Beta tab to manage access codes, sessions, and structured feedback
• Shareable Reports: share dialog with Public, Password, and Email-invite access modes plus expiration and permissions
• Public shared report view with light/dark toggle, expanded Executive Summary grid (ICP, Products, Positioning, SWOT, GEO, ACO, AI Visibility)
• Shared reports now include the full SWOT matrix (summary donut, dimension scores, quadrants) and ACO Readiness block with classification and category radar
• Share-invite emails delivered via notify.commerce.nu with unsubscribe tokens
• Dynamic usage tracking: report counts are calculated live from actual reports instead of a stored counter
• GDPR-compliant user deletion: full scrub of email-keyed data across suppressed_emails, email_send_log, beta_sessions, and related tables
• Privacy policy updated with controller identity, subprocessors, international transfers, and retention periods
• Customer ACO view aligned with the main report (three-column layout with larger radar chart)
• Admin BuiltWith PoC page enhanced with example report thumbnails
• Overview page refreshed for the AI era (Why This Matters Now, AI Visibility & Agentic Commerce, PoC initiatives)
• Security hardening: locked down app_settings public read, tightened beta session policies, revoked anon EXECUTE on internal email-queue functions, patched ws dependency, and fixed email-send abuse vector
• TanStack Start dependency alignment to resolve build-time version skew

AI Visibility, ACO depth, and gap diagnosis

CommerceSpy expands beyond competitor analysis with AI Visibility scoring, deeper ACO Readiness, and an evidence-led explanation of why scores diverge across pillars.

• AI Visibility scoring across ChatGPT and Gemini, with per-prompt coverage and ranking
• Visibility gap diagnosis explaining mismatches between AI Visibility, GEO, and ACO
• Low-confidence flagging when site inspection fails so empty fetches no longer score as zero
• GEO and ACO data-quality warnings surfaced in the Executive Summary and ACO tab
• Executive Summary layout: GEO and ACO readiness dials moved above their narrative text
• Refreshed /overview page reflecting the AI-era platform (CI + GEO + AI Visibility + ACO)
• Admin: manage per-user report limits and plan status; payment options under consideration
• BuiltWith ACO proof-of-concept page with example report thumbnails
• Stricter authorization on admin server functions and route gates

Pre-launch hardening and UX polish

A focused pass to get CommerceSpy ready for public launch — Executive Summary redesign, more resilient report access, clearer error messages, better social previews, and a few quality-of-life improvements.

• Redesigned the Executive Summary as a true dashboard overview — clickable cards, score indicators for GEO and ACO, merged Products and Pricing, prominent AI Visibility, and a selected-pages badge.
• Section navigation menu now appears directly above the Executive Summary on the Overview tab.
• More resilient report access — fixed transient "Report not found" errors during ACO, GEO, run, retry, and cancel actions.
• Friendlier error messages across the app for expired sessions, missing reports, and permission issues.
• Branded, evergreen CommerceSpy social preview image for links shared on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Slack.
• Discovery stays available when your monthly report quota is exhausted — explore competitor pages anytime (capped at 10 pages until you have quota again).
• /updates is now indexed and shows up in the sitemap; auth and password-reset pages are kept out of search results.
• Tighter TypeScript types in the admin layer and a launch smoke-test checklist for the team.

AI Commerce Optimization (ACO) Readiness

New report section that measures how prepared a company is for AI-driven buying journeys, agentic commerce, and machine-driven product discovery — plus a few report layout refinements.

• New ACO Readiness report section between GEO Readiness and AI Visibility, with an overall 0–100 ACO score and Poor → Leading classification.
• Category breakdown covering product discoverability, machine readability, content readiness, API integration, AI integration signals, and agentic commerce signals.
• Clickable evidence links per category sourced from the competitor's homepage, sitemap, robots, llms.txt, OpenAPI, MCP, agents.json, and AI plugin manifests.
• Top 5 prioritised actions to improve ACO, ranked by impact and implementation effort.
• In-app explainer spelling out what AI Commerce Optimization (ACO) means.
• Pricing intelligence moved to the bottom of the Products section for a cleaner product-first read.

Competitive intelligence improvements

Major improvements to competitive intelligence reporting and administration.

• Added AI Visibility reporting
• Added GEO Readiness analysis
• Added Function Suggestions
• Added Admin User Management
• Added Video Walkthrough on Overview Page