{"paper":{"title":"Prominence-Stratified Failure Modes in Retrieval-Augmented Commercial Recommendation: A 37,000-Run Audit","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.AI"],"primary_cat":"cs.IR","authors_text":"Keller Maloney, Noah Lehman, Sarah Xu, Will Jack","submitted_at":"2026-05-22T17:16:18Z","abstract_excerpt":"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. We audit ~37,000 production runs across four model configurations and 215 commercially-framed prompts spanning 19 sectors, evaluated against a 533-brand reference catalog stratified into five prominence tiers (L1 category leaders to L5 regional players) sourced from"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2605.27439","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2605.27439/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}