Ecommerce AI SEO: Get Your Brand Into the AI Version of Search

The answers come from several places, and each one reads the web a little differently. These are the platforms we optimize for, described in plain terms.

On every one of these platforms, the answer is assembled from pages the system can reach, understand and trust, and the brands it names are the ones those pages name. Classic rankings still matter, because most of these systems start with search results, which is why this work sits on top of our ecommerce SEO service rather than replacing it.

The commercial side is moving fast too. ChatGPT now shows product results with images, prices and links to the merchants selling them, and OpenAI has opened a way for merchants to supply product feeds. Google's AI Mode pulls from the same shopping data as Google Shopping. Your product data now feeds the answer as well as the listing.

When a shopper asks for a product with particular features at a particular price, the answer engine has to match the question to products it knows about. It can only match on the data you have given it. A product with no material, no size, no identifier and no availability is invisible to that question.

• Complete product schema. Name, brand, GTIN or MPN, price, currency, availability, shipping and returns on every product page.
• Merchant feeds. Google Merchant Center and Microsoft Merchant Center kept complete and in step with the site, and other assistants' merchant programmes where they fit your business.
• Attributes buyers ask about. Material, size, fit, compatibility, ingredients, care, what is in the box. If a buyer would ask it, the data should answer it.
• One truth across channels. The price, stock and description on your site, your feeds and your marketplace listings should agree. Conflicting data is a reason for a system to trust none of it.

We audit the product templates and the feeds together, because errors usually live in the gap between them. The same clean data helps your Google Shopping and paid campaigns, which read the same feed.

None of this works if the systems cannot read your store. Blocked crawlers are the most common reason a well-ranked brand is missing from AI answers, and it often happens without anyone deciding it.

The crawlers that matter

• Googlebot. AI Overviews and AI Mode use Google's normal search crawling, so the usual rules apply. A separate setting called Google-Extended controls whether content is used for Gemini models, and Google says it does not affect Search.
• OpenAI. OAI-SearchBot fetches pages for ChatGPT search; GPTBot is the training crawler, a separate choice.
• Perplexity. PerplexityBot builds its index, and a separate agent fetches pages when a user asks.
• Microsoft. Bingbot covers Bing and Copilot, so Bing Webmaster Tools matters more than many stores think.
• Anthropic. Claude has separate crawlers for search, for user requests and for training, each controllable on its own.

The settings that block them by accident

Robots.txt rules copied from a template, security plugins and the bot protection some hosts and CDNs now switch on by default can all turn these crawlers away. We check each one, then decide crawler by crawler which to allow, rather than leaving it to a default.

Content the crawlers can read

Answer engines read text. Product details hidden in tabs that only load after a click, specifications in images, and prices rendered late by scripts can all be missed. We make sure the important facts are in the page itself. We also add an llms.txt file, a proposed convention for guiding AI tools to your key pages, while being clear that no major engine has said it uses the file to choose sources.

There is no Search Console for most AI answers, and the tools that claim to score your AI visibility each measure something different. So we measure what we can see, the same way every time.

We build a fixed set of buyer questions for your products, categories and comparisons. On a regular schedule we run them on each platform and record whether your brand is named, how it is described, which competitors appear and which sources are cited. The trend across months tells you more than any single answer, because answers vary from one person and one day to the next.

Alongside that we watch the traffic. Visits from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot and Gemini appear in your analytics as their own referral sources, and we report the orders they bring as well as the visits. Google counts clicks and impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode inside the normal Search Console performance report, so your organic reporting already includes them.

AI SEO is one part of our ecommerce marketing agency service. For brands that want AI working inside the business as well as in the search results, our AI marketing and management agency covers customer service and lead delivery, and our custom AI solutions build tools for your store or service. For select brands, this work also sits inside our commission only ecommerce marketing offer, and for brands moving away from a single marketplace it supports our plan for selling on Amazon and off Amazon.