You wrote a rule, the product is clearly in the answer, and your AI carried on as if the rule did not exist. Work down this list — the answer is nearly always near the top.
1. Is the rule still a draft?
Drafts are never sent to your AI, on any channel. On the Rules tab, a draft carries an amber Draft chip in front of its text; a live rule has no chip at all.
Anything an AI wrote — a document import, or Copilot — arrives as a draft on purpose and stays that way until a person approves it.
2. Do the product and the rule really share a key?
This is the most common cause by far. Matching is exact: the rule and the product must share a key after tidying (lowercased, accents stripped, punctuation turned into spaces).
The fastest way to check is from the product's side. Open Brand → Products → Products, click the product, and look at:
- Keys — every key it carries, grouped by where each came from.
- Rules that match this product — every live rule that reaches it today.
If your rule is not in that second list, the keys do not match. Watch for:
- A synonym or another language. "vitamin C" does not match "ascorbic acid". Add both to the same rule.
- Word order. "vitamin c" and "c vitamin" are two different keys. Add both.
- A key made only of punctuation. Something like
—saves happily but can never match anything.
3. Does the product have any keys at all?
If the product's page shows "This product has no keys, so no rule can apply to it", no rule will ever reach it. Two possible reasons:
- your shop is not sending keys with that product; or
- the source is not set to turn the right field into keys — check Fields that become keys in the source's settings.
Changing that setting re-derives every product's keys immediately, so you can check again straight away.
4. Is the product coming from a CSV feed?
CSV feeds cannot carry rules. Products read from a CSV file get no keys at all, so no rule can ever apply to them. The Sources tab says this under the table.
The fix is a Product API source. You cannot convert a CSV source — you add a new one of the right kind.
5. Is the rule set to "when relevant"?
A when relevant rule is only passed when it relates to what the visitor actually asked. That is what it is for — it stops a long list of permitted claims arriving all at once — but it does mean the rule will legitimately sit out answers it does not fit.
If the rule must be applied every single time, switch it to Always. You can do that in bulk from the rules table.
Still stuck?
Two rarer possibilities:
- The product is disabled or gone. A product that has been switched off, or has disappeared from its source, is dropped from the answer entirely rather than described without its rules.
- The rule is live but your AI ignored it. This is unusual — the rules are handed over as binding wording that overrides everything else. If you can reproduce it, contact support with the conversation.
See also: what product rules are.