AI SEO for ecommerce gets your products named when shoppers ask Google’s AI or ChatGPT what to buy. In our study, 80.69% of the links next to brand names in Google’s AI Overviews went to other websites, not the brand’s own store. So the work happens in two places: your store, and the pages shoppers and AI read about your products. Some call it GEO, AEO or ChatGPT ecommerce SEO. It’s the same goal.
Get your products into ChatGPT shopping answers
ChatGPT now shows products right inside its answers, with a photo, a price and where to buy. Getting into those answers takes two things: being listed, and being recommended.
Get listed: your product feed
- Share a product feed with ChatGPT. ChatGPT has a merchant program that takes your product catalog. Many store platforms can connect your catalog for you.
- Fill in every field. Title, price, stock, photos and variants, plus the details shoppers ask about, like size, material and what the product is for.
- Keep it fresh. Old prices, or “in stock” items that are sold out, hurt trust.
- Let ChatGPT’s search crawler in. Check that your robots.txt file and your host’s firewall don’t block it from your product pages.
- Match your feed to your pages. Every fact should be the same in both places.
Get recommended: what the feed can’t do
A feed tells ChatGPT what you sell. It doesn’t make ChatGPT pick your product when a shopper asks for the best one. For that, ChatGPT leans on what it already knows and on what reviews, lists and guides say about you.
Our study shows how much ChatGPT relies on brands it already knows. In 82.22% of ChatGPT’s answers, it named at least one brand that an AI with no web search also named for the same question. And 85% of its mentions of those brands had no link to the brand’s own site.
Source: Web Asset Builders study of 10,000 US keywords, August–September 2026.
So a product that shows up in many trusted reviews, “best of” lists and buying guides is easier for ChatGPT to recommend. That is what our ChatGPT SEO work covers for online stores: the feed, your product pages and the pages ChatGPT reads about you.
What about ads?
ChatGPT can show labelled ads below some answers. They sit apart from the answer, and they don’t change which products the answer itself recommends. That part is earned.
Google AI Mode and AI Overviews for online stores
Google’s AI reads your product data, your product pages and the pages that rank for the shopper’s question. So there are two ways to show up.
- Your own products. Keep the product feed you send Google complete, and make it match your pages. Add clear product details, real reviews and structured data to each product page.
- Other pages that rank. Get your products named in the reviews, buying guides, “best of” lists and videos that rank for your shoppers’ questions.
The second way is easy to miss, because shoppers’ questions pull up a lot of discussion threads. For the keywords in our study, a Reddit page showed up in Google’s top 3 for 64.37% of them, and in the top 10 for 81.92%. Google’s AI often links those threads when they rank near the top.
Share of the study’s keywords with a Reddit page in Google’s regular results. Source: Web Asset Builders study of 10,000 US keywords, August–September 2026.
Google AI Mode works more like a shopping chat. Shoppers ask follow-ups like “which of these is best for sensitive skin?” and the AI narrows the list. Our study measured AI Overviews, not AI Mode. But AI Mode draws on the same Google results and product data, so the same work applies. We go deeper on it in Google AI Mode SEO.
Where AI finds products to recommend
The pages AI reads about your products are mostly written by other people:
- Review sites and product comparison pages. Star ratings, pros and cons, and side-by-side tables.
- “Best of” lists and buying guides. The pages that rank for “best [product] for [need].”
- Video reviews and how-to videos. Unboxings, tests and tutorials.
- Forum threads. Shoppers asking each other what worked for them.
- News and gift guides. Seasonal roundups and trend stories.
- Your own product and category pages. Clear facts, real reviews and answers to common questions.
When these pages describe your product the same way, the AI can recommend it with confidence. When your product is missing from them, the AI recommends someone else’s.
What we do for online stores
- Pick the products and questions that matter most. We start with your best sellers and the questions shoppers ask before they buy them.
- Check today’s answers. We see what Google’s AI Overviews, AI Mode and ChatGPT say, which products they name and which pages they use.
- Fix your feeds and product pages. Every fact matches, and every page answers the shopper’s question.
- Get your products on the pages AI trusts. Reviews, lists, guides and videos that each AI relies on, and the pages that rank.
- Track the answers. We obsessively track what each AI says, product by product, and keep closing gaps.
We run the same shortlist plan for software brands in AEO for SaaS. For your store, the first step is a free AI visibility audit. It shows which products AI recommends in your category today, and which pages to get yours on first.
