Your customers are asking ChatGPT what to buy. They’re getting answers from Perplexity before they ever see a list of search results. The problem? Right now, most eCommerce brands aren’t showing up in any of it.
That’s the uncomfortable truth about where search has landed. AI SEO, which means optimising your site to be cited and recommended by AI-powered search tools like Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity, has gone from buzzword to genuine business priority in the space of about 18 months. The brands paying attention are building a kind of visibility that compounds. The ones ignoring it are watching their organic traffic do increasingly strange things and wondering why.
If you’re running a £3M+ eCommerce brand and SEO still means keywords, meta titles and a backlink here and there, this is worth your time. The fundamentals haven’t disappeared. They’ve just got a new layer on top, and that layer is where a lot of the growth is happening right now.
Table of Contents
- What Is AI SEO?
- How AI Search Differs From Traditional Search
- Why AI Overviews Are Changing eCommerce Traffic
- What eCommerce Brands Actually Need to Do
- Common AI SEO Mistakes Brands Make
- The AI Search Landscape: Which Platforms Matter
- Measuring AI SEO Performance
- eCommerce SEO Has Grown Up, Not Died
- Frequently Asked Questions
What Is AI SEO?
AI SEO refers to optimising your website so it gets referenced, cited and recommended by AI-driven search tools. Think Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT’s browsing feature, Perplexity, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot. These tools are essentially doing what a cautious customer does before buying: reading around the subject, weighing up who seems credible and deciding whether your brand makes the cut.
Think about how you search now compared to a few years ago. You might type a full question into Google and get a generated answer before you even see a list of links, or you might ask ChatGPT which fire safety equipment supplier it recommends and actually act on that answer. eComOne’s work with Safelincs shows exactly how much this matters in practice. Over a 12-month project, Safelincs accumulated over 2,000 citations in Google AI Overviews, 225 in ChatGPT, 51 in Gemini and 48 in Copilot. That’s a different kind of visibility, and it compounds over time.
The brands building AI visibility now are creating a head start that’s going to be very difficult for competitors to close later.
How AI SEO Differs From Traditional Search
Traditional SEO has always been about signals. You build backlinks, create keyword-targeted content and fix your technical setup. Google’s algorithm processes those signals and ranks your pages accordingly.
AI search is about comprehension. These systems read your content to understand what you actually know, whether your claims are backed up and whether a user asking a relevant question would genuinely benefit from landing on your page. It’s less like a filing system and more like a very thorough editor.
Here’s a quick comparison of the two approaches:
| Factor | Traditional SEO | AI SEO |
|---|---|---|
| Primary goal | Rank in Google SERPs | Be cited by AI systems and featured in AI Overviews |
| Content focus | Keyword targeting and density | Topical authority and direct question answering |
| Trust signals | Backlinks and domain authority | Brand mentions, citations, structured data and entity recognition |
| Content format | Long-form pages with keyword variation | Concise, structured answers with schema markup and comparison tables |
| Success metrics | Rankings, organic clicks, impressions | AI citations, AI Overview appearances, brand mention volume |
| Technical priorities | Core Web Vitals, crawlability | Semantic HTML, schema markup, AI-friendly formatting |
Primary goal
Content focus
Trust signals
Content format
Success metrics
Technical priorities
That’s not to say traditional SEO becomes irrelevant; The two are deeply linked. A strong backlink profile and clean technical setup are still the foundation. AI SEO just builds a different layer on top.
Why AI Overviews Are Changing eCommerce Traffic
One specific thing worth understanding is that AI Overviews often answer a question before a user clicks anything. Being cited in that answer puts your brand at the very top of the search result, in front of someone who’s actively looking for what you sell. When they do click through, they tend to arrive with more context and higher intent than a typical organic visitor.
You’re not just getting a link in a list, you’re being recommended by the tool your customer already trusts to give them a straight answer. That kind of endorsement carries weight in a way that a position four ranking simply doesn’t. It shapes how people perceive your brand before they’ve even visited your site, which makes every subsequent touchpoint more likely to convert.
The brands that recognise this early will be the ones building the right metrics and strategy to take advantage of it.
What eCommerce Brands Actually Need to Do
This is where it gets practical. After 13 years working with eCommerce brands, the same themes come up time and again, and the eComOne SEO team has built its approach around exactly that.
Build Genuine Topical Authority
You can’t half-do this. If you sell outdoor gear, you need to be the most useful and comprehensive source of information about outdoor gear that you can realistically be. That means covering topics in depth, answering the questions your customers are actually searching for and doing it more thoroughly than your competitors.
Tools like AnswerThePublic and Google’s People Also Ask section are genuinely useful here. They surface what people are asking, which shapes the content you build. Every question answered well is another opportunity for an AI tool to cite your brand.
When eComOne worked on Safelincs’ content strategy, a core part of the approach was re-engineering existing pages so they were easier for AI systems to read and extract from. That included:
- Restructuring legacy pages with clear, scannable formatting
- Adding comparison tables for product categories
- Including concise Q&A sections designed to match how AI systems pull answers
- Writing succinct meta summaries that work for both human readers and LLM comprehension
The results showed up in AI citation counts within months. It’s not magic. It’s structure.
Get Your Technical SEO Right First
This is table stakes, but it’s still worth being direct about. Structured data (schema markup) helps AI tools understand your content. If you have product pages, FAQ sections or how-to guides that aren’t marked up with the right schema, you’re making life harder for the systems that decide whether to reference you.
For eCommerce sites specifically, the technical SEO that matter most for AI visibility include:
- Schema markup for products, FAQs, how-to guides and organisation data
- Semantic HTML that makes page structure clear to crawlers and AI systems alike
- Page speed and Core Web Vitals (still a ranking factor and affects how thoroughly pages are crawled)
- Clean site architecture so AI systems can follow your internal linking and understand topic clusters
- Canonical tags and crawl budget management, especially on large product catalogues
The point is that technical foundations and AI visibility aren’t separate workstreams, but one in the same.
Make Digital PR Part of Your SEO Strategy
If you want AI tools to trust your brand, you need trusted sources talking about you. That’s what Digital PR delivers. Coverage in relevant publications, links from authoritative sites and brand mentions across the web all contribute to how AI systems perceive your credibility.
This is partly why eComOne builds Digital PR into client SEO strategies rather than treating it as a separate service. Your backlink profile isn’t just an SEO signal anymore, but rather a trust signal for AI-generated recommendations. When Safelincs was cited by ChatGPT and Gemini, that didn’t happen because someone optimised a meta description. It happened because Safelincs had built genuine authority across its industry over a long period of time.
Write for Humans First
There’s a temptation with AI SEO to start producing content that sounds like it was designed for a machine. Resist that. AI tools are designed to serve humans, so content that’s genuinely useful, clearly written and honest about what it knows tends to perform better than content optimised within an inch of its life.
Write like you’re explaining something to a smart customer who’s never visited your site. Answer their questions fully. Be specific. Use real examples. Cite data where you can. That’s the kind of content that earns citations from AI systems because it’s the kind of content those systems are trying to find.
Consider an AI Visibility Audit
If you’re not sure where your site currently stands with AI search, eComOne offers a dedicated AI Visibility Audit that covers exactly this. It reviews how your site is indexed, how your content is interpreted by both search engines and AI systems and where opportunities exist to increase visibility. It includes technical analysis, content evaluation and competitor comparison.
Safelincs actually became one of the first UK brands to track AI citations as a formal performance KPI. That kind of approach, measuring what AI systems are doing with your content rather than just traditional ranking positions, is where serious eCommerce SEO is heading.
Common AI SEO Mistakes Brands Make
Even brands that are investing in SEO regularly fall into the same traps when it comes to AI visibility. Most of them aren’t dramatic errors, but just habits carried over from an older version of search that no longer apply in quite the same way.
Keyword stuffing
It never really worked as well as people thought and AI systems are particularly good at spotting it. Content written for keyword density rather than genuine usefulness gets passed over. AI tools are looking for clear, authoritative answers. Padding a page with variations of the same phrase is the opposite of that.
Thin product page content
This is probably the most widespread issue on eCommerce sites. A product name, a short description and a price gives an AI system almost nothing to work with. Pages that explain what a product does, who it’s for, how it compares to alternatives and what questions customers commonly ask are far more likely to be surfaced in AI responses. It’s also just better for conversion, so it’s worth fixing regardless.
Ignoring schema markup
Structured data is one of the clearest signals you can send to both search engines and AI systems about what your content actually is. Product schema, FAQ schema, how-to schema and organisation markup all help AI tools extract and attribute your content accurately. A lot of eCommerce sites either have no schema at all or have it implemented inconsistently across their catalogue.
Overlooking Digital PR
Some brands treat Digital PR as a nice-to-have rather than a core part of their SEO strategy. For AI visibility, that’s a costly oversight. AI systems use external mentions and citations to assess brand credibility in much the same way Google uses backlinks. If authoritative publications aren’t referencing your brand, you’re asking AI tools to trust you on your word alone.
Not tracking AI citations
You can’t improve what you’re not measuring. A lot of brands are still optimising purely for Google rankings without any visibility into how they’re performing in AI responses. Tools like Profound and Otterly.AI make this trackable. Safelincs became one of the first UK brands to treat AI citations as a formal KPI, and the results reflected that focus. If you’re not measuring it, it’s very hard to know whether anything you’re doing is actually working.
Get these fundamentals right and the rest of your AI SEO strategy has something solid to build on.
The AI Search Landscape: Which Platforms Matter
It’s worth knowing which AI platforms are worth paying attention to for eCommerce specifically.
| Platform | Why It Matters for eCommerce |
|---|---|
| Google AI Overviews | Appears at the top of many commercial search results; highest volume of all AI search features |
| ChatGPT (with browsing) | Growing as a product discovery and comparison tool, particularly for considered purchases |
| Perplexity | Popular among research-oriented users; often used for comparing products and suppliers |
| Google Gemini | Integrated into Google’s ecosystem; increasingly present in mobile search and Google Shopping queries |
| Microsoft Copilot | Relevant for B2B eCommerce; integrated into Windows and Microsoft 365 |
Google AI Overviews
ChatGPT (with browsing)
Perplexity
Google Gemini
Microsoft Copilot
You don’t need separate strategies for each one. The same fundamentals apply across all of them: build genuine authority, structure your content clearly and earn trust signals from credible external sources. The specifics of implementation might vary slightly but the direction is consistent.
Measuring AI SEO Performance
One of the trickier aspects of all this is knowing whether it’s working. Traditional SEO has clear metrics. AI SEO is still developing its measurement frameworks, but there are practical ways to track progress.
- AI citation tracking: Tools like Profound, Otterly.AI and BrandMentions can monitor when and how your brand appears in AI-generated responses
- Google Search Console: AI Overview impressions are increasingly visible here alongside traditional impression data
- Brand search volume: If AI tools are recommending your brand by name, you’ll often see a corresponding lift in branded search queries over time
- Share of voice in AI responses: Benchmarking your brand against competitors within AI responses for key product queries gives a clearer picture of relative visibility
The Safelincs project tracked all of these alongside traditional Search Console data. Over six months, impressions grew by 5.9 million to reach 38.7 million total, while AI citations climbed steadily across every major platform. The two storylines ran in parallel, which is exactly what a well-executed AI SEO strategy looks like.
eCommerce SEO Has Grown Up, Not Died
Some people are saying SEO is finished because of AI. It isn’t, not by a long shot. If anything, the principles of good SEO have become more important: earn trust, create useful content and build authority in your niche. AI hasn’t replaced SEO, but it has raised the bar for what good SEO looks like and shifted where the rewards show up.
The brands that win over the next few years will invest in real authority, real content and real relationships with their industry. That’s what AI SEO rewards. It’s also what eComOne has been building for clients for over 13 years.
If you’re an eCommerce brand wondering whether your current strategy is keeping pace, the eComOne SEO team is a good place to start that conversation.
Frequently Asked Questions About AI SEO for eCommerce
What is AI SEO?
Does AI SEO replace traditional SEO?
How do I get my eCommerce brand cited in AI search results?
What’s the difference between AI Overviews and traditional search rankings?
How do I measure AI SEO success?
Is AI SEO relevant for smaller eCommerce brands?
About the Author
Carrianne Dukes
Head of Brand
Carrianne Dukes is Head of Brand at eComOne and a member of the leadership team, where she oversees the agency’s positioning, marketing, and reputation. She leads eComOne’s national events portfolio, global podcast, CSR initiatives, and partnership ecosystem, while also managing and developing her own team. Outside of work, Carrianne has never shied away from a […]
