Why it matters
A distributor syndicates the same hydraulic-fitting specs to Amazon Business and to its own site. The Amazon copy outranks the distributor's page and gets cited in AI answers. The distributor did the work of normalizing the attributes and writing the description. The marketplace earned the citation. Syndication decides which copy of your data engines treat as canonical, and the destination with more authority usually wins.
How to control which copy wins
You cannot stop a marketplace from outranking you, but you can make your own page the better-structured source. Mark up your products with structured data, keep part numbers and attributes identical to the syndicated feed, and publish the cross-reference and fitment detail that the marketplace listing strips out. The goal is parity on the data and an edge on depth.
In practice
Say you feed 40,000 SKUs of pneumatic components to a syndication platform that pushes to four marketplaces. Audit a sample of those SKUs in an AI engine. If the cited source is consistently the marketplace, your own product pages are losing the attribution even though they hold the original PIM data. Fix the parity gap on your site before chasing more channels.