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Have AI search tools rendered SEO strategies obsolete?
You’ll have heard it said hundreds of times by now, “AI is the biggest disrupter to ecommerce in years” - we’re guilty of saying it ourselves. It’s meaning may have worn thin, but it couldn’t be more true. In fact, with everything AI enables, it both opens up new pathways for brands to grow and makes the process for customers discovering new products and services easier than ever before.
This presents a two pronged hurdle for brands to overcome - having to compete with other brands who are able to implement and execute strategies quickly, and learning how to manoeuvre through these changing customer behaviours.
That second point opens a whole other world of questions.
CRM platform, Omnisend, recently found that 65% of customers use Gen AI tools in the ecommerce process, with 25% even saying they’ll go to ChatGPT before Google. Stats like these are leading many in the ecommerce world to second guess the importance of SEO and reconsider the importance it will play in ecommerce in even just the near future.
So,
Long story short - no, but let’s look at how AI tools are changing how customers find new products, how it’s affecting SEO and wider marketing strategies, and what you as an ecommerce brand need to do.
Just like how the convenience of ecommerce caused a decline in brick and mortar spending, the convenience of AI searching forecasts a decline in the usage of typical search engines like google. Customers have largely clocked on to the fact that, just because a business ranks first on Google, doesn’t mean the product is the best in class. SEO is an algorithmically-dependent game, one that ecommerce businesses can play and - theoretically - win.
For customers looking to discover brands that more accurately reflect their search intentions, AI search tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity offer a refreshing alternative - serving up a curated list of results.
“Googling often means ads, SEO content, and dozens of open tabs before you find what you need”. “In contrast, generative AI tools tend to give you a distilled answer similar to that of a knowledgeable friend, making it easy to see why shoppers would choose one over the other to help with purchase decisions.” - Omnisend’s Marty Bauer
As AI search tools grow more powerful and more customers make the switch from Google, does SEO become less important to businesses looking to grow? Well that begs the question…
Once ecommerce brands started to realise that they were getting traffic through AI search tools, the questions that naturally follows are “How do we get more?” “How do we optimise our site for AI?”
Surely if brands are being recommended by AI tools, there must be some logic behind how AI has chosen one over another? Well, there absolutely is, and the strategies for getting your brand recognised by AI are - rather uncreatively - being referred to as Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO).
Much like Google, AI tools like ChatGPT crawl and summarise information from across the web, presenting concise answers or shopping recommendations. This means that your website can be optimised for AI search results much like how it can be optimised for Google. But, whilst there’s some overlap, the criteria AI uses isn’t the exact same as Google.
While traditional SEO strategies try to get your content to rank against certain phrases, GEO strategies require you to answer questions about your product and service through content. But crucially, your website isn’t the only thing playing a role. So, let’s look at a basic framework for getting your site to show up in AI search results.
°We’ll use ChatGPT as an example here, but the same rules apply no matter the tool in question.
The first step is to make sure that your site has opted in to OpenAI’s Search crawler “OAI-SearchBot”. To do this, you may need to update your robots.txt file, to ensure that OAI-SearchBot has access.
Publishers who allow OAI-SearchBot to access their content can track referral traffic from ChatGPT using analytics platforms such as Google Analytics. ChatGPT automatically includes the UTM parameter utm_source=chatgpt.com in referral URLs, enabling clear tracking and analysis of inbound traffic from ChatGPT search results.
AI tools look for content that answers questions rather than simply looking for the number-one-ranked search result. So it will prioritise sites with lots of FAQ content and sites that actually list product details such as materials, USPs, use cases, and other specs.
In addition to this, prominent positioning of on site reviews and other forms of User Generated Content will give your site a leg up, much like how it does for traditional search engines.
If you’ve done a lot of work on the technical SEO of your website, don’t think that your efforts have gone to waste. JSon schema, correctly formatted H1s and metadata, and descriptive image alt text are just as important to AI searches as they are to Google, if not more so.
AI tools pull data in chunks, and structured markup schema labels content explicitly, making it more likely to be cited. Some of the key markup schemas for AI include…
This will give tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity all of the information they need to pick your brand to appear in their search results.
A quick win once all of your content is optimised and your markup schema is in place, is to publish an LLMs.TXT file on your site. An llms.txt file is a proposed standard that helps AI systems better understand your website by providing basic information about your site and organisation. Unlike robots.txt (which controls crawling permissions), llms.txt is a simple plain text file that typically includes a brief site description, contact information, and links to key pages.
While llms.txt may help AI tools navigate and understand your site's purpose more effectively, it's currently an emerging standard that isn't widely adopted or required by most AI systems. However, it’s becoming a more commonplace practice to add a llms.txt file to make sure your site is as optimised for AI searches, even if traditional SEO practices - clear site structure, and quality content - remain the primary factors for visibility in AI-powered search results.
The llms.txt file should be added inside your website’s root directory and can easily be created using a web-based tool such as geordy.ai
Beyond these elements of your website, which you as the owner of the site have direct control over, AI search tools prioritise recent, trusted sources of information to give customers the best search results.
The core off site links:
It would seem the pendulum has swung in the other direction and it’s off site reputation that’s doing a lot of work. Whilst digital PR strategies and affiliate marketing can give you a slight boost, the only thing you can directly control is providing a high quality end product - one that customers and listicles champion enough to post about elsewhere.
As AI-powered shopping tools like ChatGPT become foundational to the discovery of new brands and products, getting ahead of the game by optimising your site accordingly is the new foundation for visibility. Whilst category leaders likely won’t see much fall off, brands that solely invest in their SEO risk being left out of the AI-generated answers that consumers are increasingly turning to.
But that doesn’t mean traditional SEO is done for. While Google may have newfound competition, it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. Additionally, whilst AI searches may have skyrocketed, AI search results still lean heavily on SEO principles. This is why forward-thinking teams are now combining their SEO and AI search optimisation approaches to future-proof their digital strategy.
Both GEO and SEO benefit from clear headings, concise paragraphs, relevant visuals, and accurate product information. In fact, hybrid strategies, where brands continue strong SEO while layering on AI best practices are producing the best results across channels. After all, the structured content, markup schema, and digital PR strategies that AI tools love, have long been stalwarts of the SEO game too. Optimising for AI just requires a shift in mindset on what kind of content is being produced.
The rise of generative AI has rewritten the playbook for online shopping discovery. Whilst the keyword is far from dead, it’s slightly less important than it was previously. GEO is now a main player in the digital marketing mix - one that requires much more than a quick technical tweak.
As search and shopping experiences become more conversational, the brands that thrive will be those willing to rethink how they answer real customer questions, structure their data, and build credibility at every touchpoint.
If you’d like to learn more about GEO - contact us, we’d love to hear from you.
