Our very own Theo Roberts took to the stage at BrightonSEO 2026 to talk about the thing keeping every eCommerce SEO up at night. No, it’s not algorithm updates (for once), or even someone who keeps asking LinkedIn they’re not number one for a keyword with 4.7 billion results.
Nope. It’s AI search. The brands that figure it out first are going to have a serious head start on the ones still spamming keywords like it’s 2019.
Here’s everything Theo covered, distilled into something you can act on.
So, what does it mean?
A few years ago, SEO had three clear lanes: technical, content, links. You worked those three things, you got results. It was simple and pretty predictable (well, mostly).
That model hasn’t disappeared, but it’s had some extensions built onto it. Those extensions are now where a lot of the opportunity lives.
The shift is this: search isn’t just Google ranking your pages anymore. It’s AI tools deciding whether your brand is worth mentioning at all. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, and everything that comes after them are actively shaping what people learn about your products before they ever visit your site.
So, here are the two new terms you need in your vocabulary.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is optimising for AI-generated responses. The stuff ChatGPT pulls together when someone asks it a question. You want to be the source it pulls from. That means genuinely helpful, in-depth content written like an actual human wrote it (wild concept, we know), with summaries and FAQs that make it easy to extract.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) is about winning zero-click visibility. Getting your content into direct answer results without someone needing to click anywhere. Structured data, semantic clarity, clean headings, one question answered per section.
Traditional SEO sits at the centre of both. It’s still the engine, but GEO and AEO are the turbo kits.
E-E-A-T: still the most important acronym in the room
Before the 10 implementations, here’s the thing that everything else sits on top of.
Experience. Expertise. Authority. Trust.
AI search engines aren’t just reading your content, they now actually make judgements about whether you’re a source worth trusting. That means sharing opinions and first-hand insights (not just regurgitating what everyone else says), building content that goes deep on your niche, earning links from sites that actually matter, and being transparent about who you are and what you do.
The broader ecosystem matters here too. Digital PR, building a proper presence on LinkedIn, showing up in communities, using email marketing and creating video are all great examples of things you should be utilising. They feed the signals that tell AI: this brand knows what it’s talking about.
The 10 things Theo told a room full of SEOs to go and do
Now you know the definitions, where do you get started? Luckily for you (and all of Brighton SEO), Theo is more than happy to share his tips and tricks.
1. Write for passages, not pages
AI doesn’t sit down and read your page like a human does. It scans for passages that answer specific questions and uses them. If your paragraphs are doing five different jobs at once, none of them will be pulled.
The fix is to go through your key content and make sure every section answers one question, cleanly, before moving to the next. Think of it like a well-organised FAQ that happens to be readable. Each paragraph should be able to stand alone and still make sense.
2. Build topical authority properly
This isn’t just “write lots of content”. It’s about structure. Main category page, subcollection pages beneath it, and then three to five supporting articles that link back up into those pages using consistent anchor text. Digital PR that builds links directly to those collection pages, not just your homepage.
That hierarchy tells search engines (and AI) that you don’t just sell this stuff. You understand it.
3. Win the query fan-out
When someone asks an AI a question, it expands that into multiple related queries behind the scenes before building its answer. This is the query fan-out. Your job is to have content that answers those sub-questions too, so AI keeps coming back to your site for different parts of the same answer.
Example from the talk: if your core category is classic car brake parts, you also want to be answering “how to tell if classic car brake fluid has gone bad”, “best brake pads for a 1970s Triumph”, “why do classic car brakes feel spongy”. Win enough of those and you’re feeding one commercial page from five to ten different entry points.
4. Let the bots in
This sounds obvious until you audit your site and find half your content sitting behind noindex tags or blocked from crawlers for reasons nobody can remember.
Keep content open-access. Add dates and sources. Cite external references. Implement schema. Put tables and structured content above the fold where possible. AI loves structured data, and if it can’t read your site, it’s not going to recommend it. Neither is Google, for that matter.
5. Add new page types to the mix
Some content formats are just better suited to how AI pulls answers, and most eCommerce sites are missing them entirely.
Listicles (proper Top 10 articles, not thin filler pieces) get surfaced constantly. Glossary pages with clean definitions are brilliant for “what is” searches and help AI understand your brand’s entity. A beefed-up About Us page gives AI something concrete to work with when someone asks who you are.
6. Ask AI what it thinks of you
One of the quickest and most eye-opening things you can do this week. Go to ChatGPT. Type in your brand name. Read what comes back.
Is your returns policy in there? Your reviews? Your best-known products? The thing that makes you different from your competitors?
Whatever’s missing from that answer is a gap in your content strategy. What AI says about you is increasingly what potential customers learn about you before they ever visit your site. Fill those gaps deliberately, and do it before your competitors think to.
7. Create comparison content
This one is criminally underused in eCommerce. AI gets asked comparison questions constantly. “Brand A vs Brand B.” “Best option for a first-time buyer vs a professional.” “Budget vs premium.” “Genuine parts vs aftermarket.”
If you’re not the source that answers those questions, someone else is. Build genuine vs alternative content, best alternatives in your category, use-case specific recommendations, and full buying guides. Not thin stuff. Real, useful content that actually helps someone make a decision.
8. Build your brand pages out
AI ranks brands, not just individual pages. And a brand with no depth is harder for AI to confidently recommend.
Five pages every eCommerce site should have and keep updated: About Us, Brand History, Sustainability, Market or Location pages, Shipping and Returns. These pages give AI clear, factual, trustworthy information about who you are. They also build the E-E-A-T signals that flow through everything else on your site.
9. Make social proof visible and specific
Reviews, case studies, testimonials, user-generated content and press coverage aren’t just conversion tools. They’re credibility signals that AI picks up on.
Automated post-purchase emails to collect reviews consistently, a proper “as seen in” press section, specific customer quotes placed on relevant pages (not just a generic testimonials page nobody visits), a customer photo gallery for UGC, and at least one meaty case study per quarter. The data-heavy kind, not the fluffy kind.
10. Give AI a page to work from
This is newer and tends to be underused. Create a plain-text page that tells AI exactly who you are: what you do, who you serve, what makes you different, your key policies, your positioning. Keep it factual, scannable, and updated monthly.
The logic is simple. If you don’t give AI accurate information about your brand, it will piece something together from whatever it can find. That might be fine. It might not be. Why leave it to chance?
Bonus tip, and Theo mentioned this took about 15 minutes to set up: add an /llms.txt file to your site. Think of it as robots.txt but for AI crawlers. It’s a clear, structured brief that tells AI tools exactly what to do with your content. Good, eh?
A content type cheat sheet
Different content formats serve different purposes across SEO, AEO, and GEO. Category pages are your commercial anchors. AEO pages answer single direct questions and punch hard for zero-click results. How-to guides capture process queries. Listicles are AI catnip because of their clean structure. Comparison pages and buying guides catch people at decision time. Glossary hubs help AI understand your brand as an entity. Case studies build credibility. Long-form guides build topical depth over time.
None of these replace each other. The strongest sites use all of them, mapped to the right intent, building authority from multiple directions at once.
The honest summary
To make it clear, SEO hasn’t been replaced. It’s just grown up a bit. The three pillars still matter, but the brands that are going to win the next few years are the ones building genuine authority and giving AI tools everything they need to surface them confidently.
The good news is most of your competitors haven’t done this yet. The slightly uncomfortable news is that window won’t stay open forever.
Want to talk through what this looks like for your store? Theo is the person to speak to. Catch him at theo@ecomone.com. We have a fantastic team of experts here at eComOne, so think about getting in touch to have a commitment-free chat about what we can do.
