Hi Reader,
I recently chatted with another business owner about whether small businesses can be featured in AI recommendations. He thought that the big corporations would get all of the action, but I had my own anecdotal experience to disagree with him!
He was fascinated to hear how many shop owners have been referred to my team at Aeolidia by ChatGPT or other LLMs. I told him my theory: with SEO, you're basically playing "king of the mountain" with Google; everyone is fighting to be the first result or at least on the first page. With AI, however, it feels more like we have a world full of many small hills instead of that single, hard-to-scale mountain. It's easy to stroll up to the top of my own particular hill, and there's more room for everyone on their individual hills.
This is because people usually type something quick and generic, like "Shopify designer," into Google, causing a lot of competition and allowing those with huge content budgets to win. With ChatGPT, instead of a generic search, people get detailed about exactly what problem they're trying to solve and what kind of team they want to work with. Because of this, the results they receive are tailored to them and completely exclude our "king of the mountain" style competitors.
This is a great opportunity for small shops! If people can search for and find the exact thing you sell, it's less of a struggle and more like matchmaking. We're finding that people who are "referred" by an AI tool are more invested in working with us than those who find us through Google. It almost feels like a recommendation from a real person. Automatic trust. What would it mean for your business if you could easily find your tribe of perfect customers in this way?
That's why I've called on Helen Hulskamp, our full-time Ecommerce Strategist at Aeolidia, to share insights on using AI tools to market your business.
Helen, how do shop owners get their products to show up when someone asks ChatGPT for recommendations?
There’s a name for this! While SEO is the art of getting found in search engine results, GEO (generative engine optimization) is the art of getting recommended by AI. It’s a good idea to think about GEO now, because smaller brands that get started early have a chance to win an outsized share of traffic from AI.
The fundamentals of SEO are as important as ever. AI often uses search results as part of its research process, so brands that rank well in Google are already getting recommended more often by AI. These SEO best practices also make your content easier for AI to understand:
- Prioritize helpful content that answers questions: literal product titles, detailed product descriptions, FAQs, buyer’s guides, and use-case content.
- Make sure your product schema and structured data are in top shape. We like the JSON-LD for SEO app for this.
- Cultivate on-site reviews and keep up your PR efforts. About 70% of AI citations come from sources outside your own website. What other people say about your brand and products is more trustworthy to AI than what you say yourself.
There are also new strategies unique to AI visibility. Rather than searching for and scraping your site, AI platforms will prioritize a direct data connection when one is available. Shopify Catalog gives AI platforms an API connection to your product data, but it’s up to you to make sure that data is complete and high-quality.
Tell AI about your brand. Install the Shopify Knowledge Base app and review the auto-generated FAQs about your store. Customize any answers that aren’t quite right, add your own, and make sure your store policies (returns, shipping, contact info) are complete and current. This is how AI agents answer non-product questions about your business; if the information isn’t there, they’ll guess or skip over you.
Tell AI about your products. Assign the most specific product category available in Shopify’s standard taxonomy; “bracelet” is more likely than “jewelry” to get matched to the right queries. Front-load your product descriptions with the most important details because AI may only read the first 6,000 characters. Make sure specs and size guides are text or HTML, not hidden in images. If your product information is spread across accordions, metafields, and other sections on the page, consider creating a dedicated AI product description and mapping it so agents get one clean, consolidated version of your data. If you’ve split variants out as separate products, you’ll need a technical solution to group them, so AI sees one product with options instead of separate, unrelated items.
This is a quickly evolving area, and there are more factors than we can talk about here. Our AI Visibility checklist for the shops we work with is already 50 items long! But it mainly boils down to clean data, clear policies, useful content, and a reputation people trust.
Thanks, Helen! If this feels like a lot, or you have other priorities on your plate, my team is here to help. Please check in with me about our SEO services, and we can work on your AI visibility throughout the project. You can grab our rate sheet here, or email me back to get the bullet list of everything we cover in our SEO projects.
