AEO 101Single source of truth on AEO · Updated May 13, 2026Read it

For ecommerce and DTC brands

Be the brand AI recommends when shoppers ask which product to buy.

When shoppers ask ChatGPT for the best product in your category, do they hear your brand or a competitor's? Most ecommerce teams have no idea. We run the work that puts you inside the answer.

§01 Why AI search is reshaping ecommerce

The shopping query is leaving the search box.

ChatGPT now serves more than 800 million weekly users. A growing share of them are using it for product research before they ever open a retailer site. The behaviour is the same as a Google query a decade ago, with one important change: the result is a single named recommendation, not ten ranked links.

For an ecommerce brand, that compresses the buying funnel into a single moment. Either your SKU is the named answer, or it is not in consideration. Page-two ranking does not exist on a chat surface. There is no second click. The shopper hears two or three brands, picks one, and goes to checkout.

The work for ecommerce is no longer ranking pages. It is engineering the source pool that AI reads from, getting your SKUs cited inside that pool, and keeping the attributes consistent across every surface the model trusts.

§02 What we do for ecommerce brands

Six lines of work, run weekly, owned by us.

Each block describes the actual work, not a tool we hand over. You receive named outcomes on a fixed cadence; we carry the production, the publication relationships, and the platform monitoring.

01

SKU-level visibility audit on the prompts buyers actually ask

We pull the prompts shoppers run in your category, map each one to the SKUs you sell, and audit how AI answers today. The output is a SKU-by-SKU report of where you appear, where a competitor wins, and where the answer pool has no clear recommendation yet.

02

AI shopping prompt curation, owned and maintained

Your category has a working set of 80 to 200 shopping prompts that decide the sale. We curate that list with you on day one and re-run it every week against ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI Overviews. You stop guessing which queries matter.

03

Product attribute accuracy across AI source pools

AI answers pull product attributes from your PDPs, retailer pages, marketplace listings, and review sites. When those disagree, AI picks one and runs with it. We reconcile the attributes that decide recommendation, and we keep them aligned across surfaces.

04

Retailer-page and marketplace citation work

ChatGPT cites Amazon, Walmart, Sephora, and category aggregators more than it cites your own DTC site. We work the citation patterns those pages follow, brief retail teams on the structures that get pulled, and place your SKUs inside the answer pool the way AI reads it.

05

AI product recommendation surfacing across categories

Recommendation rate is the metric that matters: not whether AI mentions you, but whether AI recommends you over a named competitor. We engineer the third-party validation, review density, and category framing that move recommendation rate week over week.

06

Weekly drift monitoring and course correction

Product catalogs change. Retailer prices change. Review counts change. AI answers drift with all of them. We monitor the curated prompt set every week and respond inside seven days when a source-pool shift hits a SKU you care about.

§03 The outcomes we commit to

Named results, written into the engagement letter.

We deliver results, not dashboards. The pilot pricing is built around it. You pay €500 per month for tools and APIs plus your direct media spend. We carry the team. At the end of the 90-day pilot, if we hit the goal we agreed on day one, the engagement converts on a €6,000 success fee and a €2,500 per month retainer thereafter. If we miss, you walk. No further obligation.

Citation share on a fixed shopping prompt set

We define 80 to 200 shopping prompts for your category on day one. The success metric is the lift in your citation share across those prompts on a named platform.

Recommendation rate against named competitors

The harder metric, and the one that moves revenue. We commit to a target recommendation rate against the two or three competitors that already win these queries.

Source-pool position on category aggregators

Most shopping answers cite the same five to ten domains in each category. We commit to inclusion in that domain set, measured by direct citation in the AI answer.

SKU-level inclusion in AI Overviews

For Google AI Overviews on commercial product queries, the deliverable is your SKU appearing inside the Overview by brand and product name.

§04 Who this is for

DTC brands and category retailers whose PDPs are not appearing in AI answers.

The typical brand we engage runs between five million and two hundred million in annual revenue, sells across DTC and at least one major retailer, and has a small in-house growth team that has been told to figure out AI visibility on top of its existing remit. The PDPs are well built for SEO. The AI search problem is not.

You usually come to us because one of three things is happening. Your category competitors are appearing in ChatGPT answers and you are not. Your AI Overview presence is declining on the commercial queries you used to win. Or your retailer team is asking what to put on Amazon and Walmart pages so that AI cites your SKU, and no one inside the building has a clear answer.

§05 How we work

One framework, applied weekly. The methodology is public.

The work runs on the CITE framework. We comprehend the prompt set, influence the source pool, track citation and recommendation movement on a weekly cadence, and evolve the program as platforms shift. The research underneath is published openly.

§06 FAQ

The questions ecommerce buyers ask before they engage.

How does ChatGPT decide which products to recommend?
ChatGPT pulls from a small set of cited sources for any shopping query. The pool usually includes retailer pages (Amazon, Walmart, Sephora, category specialists), independent review sites, Reddit and forum threads in the category, and a handful of editorial publications. Your own PDPs are rarely the deciding source. The model weighs product attributes, review consistency, freshness, and the structure of the cited pages. Brands win recommendation when their products appear with consistent attributes and credible third-party validation inside that source pool, not when they spend more on the PDP itself.
Why don't my PDPs appear in AI shopping results?
Two common reasons. First, the PDP is built for Google ranking, not for passage extraction. AI pulls clean attribute blocks, concise feature passages, and structured FAQ content; most PDPs bury that under marketing copy. Second, AI rarely cites the brand's own product page when a higher-authority retailer or review site carries the same SKU. The fix is not to compete with the retailer page. The fix is to make sure your SKU is correctly represented on the pages AI does cite, and to engineer your own PDP so that when AI does read it, the answer-grade content is at the top.
Does Amazon or major retailer presence help or hurt?
It mostly helps, with one caveat. Retailer presence puts your SKU inside the pages AI already cites, so it raises the floor on visibility. The caveat is attribute drift. If your Amazon listing says one thing and your DTC PDP says another, AI picks the version it trusts more, which is usually the retailer. The work is making sure your SKU information across Amazon, Walmart, Sephora, Target, and the category specialists agrees with your own site on the attributes that decide recommendation: size, materials, ingredients, compatibility, warranty.
How do AI Overviews change product discovery?
AI Overviews now sit above the blue links on a large share of commercial queries. For product searches, the Overview names two to five products by brand, summarises attributes, and links to a handful of cited pages. If your SKU is not in that Overview, the click rate on the page-one organic result below it drops sharply, and the shopper may never scroll. The implication for ecommerce is that ranking position one on Google is no longer the same as being the first answer; the first answer is the Overview, and it has its own rules.
What can ecommerce do that traditional SEO cannot?
Traditional SEO optimises for ranking position, traffic, and click-through rate. AI visibility optimises for citation share, recommendation rate, and source-pool position on a curated set of shopping prompts. The work overlaps in places (schema, page structure, page authority) and diverges in others: retailer-page coordination, third-party review density, forum and Reddit positioning, comparison-page engineering, and attribute consistency across surfaces. A good SEO program will not produce these outcomes on its own. They need a separate operating discipline.

Ready to become the answer AI gives?

Book a 30-minute discovery call. We'll show you what AI says about your brand today. No pitch. Just data.