GEO
5 articles
Block the Wrong Bot and Your Products Vanish From AI Search
You can have the cleanest product catalog on the open web and still be invisible inside ChatGPT and Perplexity. Not because your data is wrong, but because a single line in a file most merchants never open is quietly telling the shopping crawlers to stay out. TL;DR: AI shopping engines use two different kinds of crawlers: training bots and retrieval bots. Blocking the retrieval bot removes your products from AI search answers entirely, even if your feed and schema are perfect. Most robo
AI Shopping Search Now Grades Your Product Twice
A shopper asks for "a quiet cordless vacuum for hardwood and pet hair under $300." The assistant does not run one search. It fires a dozen, reads the passages it gets back, grades its own first draft, then goes back for more if the evidence is thin. Your product can get retrieved and still lose, because a second pass decided a rival's data answered the question better. TL;DR: AI shopping search has moved past single-shot retrieval. Google AI Mode, ChatGPT Search, and Perplexity now plan
Google Says AEO Is "Still SEO." It's Right and Also Incomplete.
Google published its first official AI search optimization guide on May 15. The core message: optimizing for AI Overviews and AI Mode is "still SEO." There is no separate AEO or GEO discipline from Google's perspective. Site owners do not need llms.txt files, content chunking, AI-specific schema, or AI-targeted rewrites. For Google's surface, that is mostly true. For the rest of the agentic web, it is exactly the wrong takeaway. TL;DR: Google's May 15 guide formally folds AEO and GEO in
Query Fan-Out for Commerce: The Hidden Retrieval Layer
A shopper types "what's the best stroller for a 6-month-old who fits in a small SUV trunk." That single sentence does not get answered by one search. Behind the scenes, the AI assistant decomposes it into eight to twelve sub-queries, runs them in parallel, scores the passages it gets back, and assembles an answer. Most product pages are tuned for the original query and invisible to the sub-queries that actually do the work. TL;DR: Query fan-out is the technique that AI search engines us
AI Shopping Hit Mainstream in Q1 2026. Most Brands Aren't Ready.
TL;DR In Q1 2026, five independent consumer polls and Adobe's commerce analytics landed on the same story. Between 30% and 50% of US online adults used AI for shopping in some form, with an IBM-NRF global study of 18,000 consumers reporting 45%. AI-referred traffic to US retailers grew 393% year over year. AI visitors now convert 42% better than humans. The question stopped being "will consumers use AI to shop?" It is now "which brands are visible when they do?" What five independent