AEO is the practice of making your products and brand citable inside AI-generated answers. When a shopper asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini "what's the best handmade gift for a gardener," AEO is what decides whether your product is in the reply. It comes down to clear, consistent product data that an assistant can name with confidence.
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AEO is making your facts clean enough for AI to quote. When your page reads clearly, the answer can name you and use your own words as the source.
Search used to hand you a list. AI hands you an answer. That opens a new way for stores to get found.
When buyers ask an assistant about a purchase, they get a short list of specific products, described and often linked. AEO is how you earn a place on that list.
In traditional search, ranking eighth still brought a few clicks. An AI answer names a few products, so being one of them is what counts.
SEO optimizes a page to rank in a list a human clicks. AEO, and the closely-related GEO (generative engine optimization, the term you'll see more in B2B), help AI pull out your facts, trust them and use them in its answer.
SEO is measured by position, where your link sits. AEO is measured by citation, whether the answer names you, quotes your facts and links your page. Both reward clean, trustworthy content, and each has its own goal.
“In 2026 you'll want both. SEO helps people find you, and AEO helps AI recommend you.”
Roughly: an assistant takes the shopper's request, fans it out into sub-queries, searches for each, collects from the sources it can read and trust, then merges everything into a shortlist. It pulls out facts first, then writes the answer. Products with facts it's confident about make the list.
Marketplace pages are built to convert human shoppers. Review widgets, upsell modules, scripts and lazy-loaded galleries can make the facts an assistant needs harder to find.
You can keep your page just as it is for shoppers. Then give AI its own clean, structured twin of the page, built to be read.
Fourteen things make a difference. The first eight are free, and you can do them this week. The last six are ongoing technical work, and that's the part Herald automates.
The step beyond AI recommending you is AI acting for the shopper: agents that research, compare and increasingly buy on a buyer's behalf. Getting ready means steady basics like stable URLs, machine-readable offers and policies, live availability and a clear path back to your checkout.
An assistant can read and recommend you, so you make the shortlist when a person asks.
An agent can act on your store: parse your offers and policies, check live stock, and route a purchase to your checkout.
For a shopper's assistant today or a buying agent tomorrow, clear and complete product data, backed up by other sources, is what works. Do it by hand with the checklist above, or, once Herald opens, let it build and publish that data for you. We think every seller, whatever their size, deserves a place in AI answers today and in the agentic marketplace next.
Herald is in early access. Tell us about your store and we'll be in touch.