Search behaviour and the way that users research products online has undergone significant changes in recent years. While traditional search engines do remain an important part of the ecommerce customer journey, more consumers are beginning to use AI platforms to research products, compare their options, and make buying decisions.
From Google’s AI Mode to ChatGPT’s in-chat shopping experiences, AI search presents new opportunities for ecommerce brands to get their products in front of potential customers. Rather than simply returning a list of links, these platforms can interpret a user’s requirements, recommend relevant products, and help to narrow down purchasing decisions.
For ecommerce sites, this is an important opportunity that goes beyond just getting your brand mentioned in AI-generated answers or earning citations through informational content. The goal is now to meet the change in SERP psychology, ensuring actual products and key category pages are discoverable, understandable, and eligible to be surfaced when users are actively looking to buy.
This blog will cover some of the key areas for ecommerce brands to focus on when preparing their website for this shift.
Prepare your product pages
Product pages are arguably some of the most valuable assets on an ecommerce website, so making sure they’re well optimised and accessible for users and crawlers should be a priority.
AI platforms need to understand exactly what a product is, what it offers, who it’s suitable for, and how it compares to other available options. If important product information is missing, unclear, or inconsistent, it becomes much harder for AI crawlers to accurately interpret and recommend it.
As a starting point, assess the quality and completeness of your product data. Product names and descriptions should cover all relevant attributes and supporting information.
Consider whether your product pages include:
- Complete product information: Clearly list key specifications, dimensions, materials, colour, size, model, and other relevant attributes.
- Consistent product variants: Make sure different sizes, colours and models are clearly distinguished, with accurate information for each available variation.
- Clear descriptions: Use natural, descriptive language to explain what the product is, who/what it’s designed for, and what makes it different.
- Features and benefits: Translate technical specifications into tangible customer benefit, explaining why particular features matter. Consider presenting this in a table format.
- Relevant terminology: Incorporate natural synonyms and descriptive attributes that customers might use when searching for a product, including terms such as ‘space-saving’, ‘travel-friendly’ or ‘easy to assemble’, where relevant.
Trust signals & social proof
Customer reviews and feedback are another valuable consideration, particularly for specific product pages, but also sitewide. Not only do they provide social proof for prospective buyers, but they can also give additional context around product quality, performance and suitability. Reviews often introduce natural language and specific use cases that may not otherwise appear in a retailer’s product description. This provides AI engines with even more information that could increase the likelihood of a particular product page being surfaced in its results.
Ultimately, product pages should provide a comprehensive and accurate picture of what you’re selling, making it easier for both potential customers and AI-powered platforms to understand the value of each product.
Prioritise detailed structured data
Structured data is a hugely important tool to help search engines understand the content and purpose of any website. For ecommerce brands, it’s particularly valuable when it comes to communicating detailed product information and attributes.
Implementing accurate, relevant schema markup gives search engines a clear, structured way of interpreting information such as product names, prices, availability, reviews and delivery options.
For product pages, Product and Offer schema types are particularly important. Depending on the information available, you may also want to incorporate additional properties covering:
- Product variants and brand information
- Stock availability and pricing
- Shipping and delivery options
- Returns information
- Aggregate ratings and reviews
It’s equally important to consider the wider structure of your website. Using relevant schema types across different page templates can help establish clearer relationships between your content. For example:
- BreadcrumbList: Communicates where a product sits within your website hierarchy
- ItemList: Can indicate overarching categories and collections of products
- Article: Provides additional context around editorial content
- Organisation: Helps search engines understand your brand and business
The key is to make sure your structured data is both accurate and relevant to the page it’s implemented on. It should reflect the information users can actually see, rather than introducing additional or conflicting information.
It is important to bear in mind that schema markup is not a shortcut to getting products featured in AI results, and it doesn’t guarantee visibility. However, it does provide another valuable source of structured information that can support how search engines and AI crawlers interpret your products and website.
Build brand authority with digital PR
Product-level optimisation is important, but ecommerce brands shouldn’t overlook the wider reputation and authority of their website.
AI platforms draw on information from multiple sites across the web when researching brands, identifying relevant products, and generating recommendations. Having a strong and credible presence beyond your own website can therefore contribute to how your brand is perceived and represented online. Digital PR activity and securing quality referring domains on a regular basis is therefore extremely important.
Earning relevant, authoritative backlinks from trusted publications and websites can help to strengthen your overall backlink profile, while coverage relating to your key product categories can reinforce your brand’s association with relevant topics.
For example, a homeware retailer looking to strengthen its visibility around garden furniture could benefit from relevant coverage in interiors, gardening and lifestyle publications. This helps to build a wider footprint of credible third-party references around the products and categories that matter most to the business. Ideally, any links secured would utilise optimal keyword anchor text for the destination page to further boost that injection of topical relevance.
Whilst linked mentions pointing to priority pages are incredibly valuable, there is also some value in general brand mentions if a followed backlink is not on the cards. Even being discussed, recommended, and referenced across relevant websites can contribute to a brand’s wider online presence even when those mentions don’t include a direct link. This all helps to build strong brand presence across the web for AI crawlers to draw on and factor in to the results they present to users.
The aim should always be to build genuine brand recognition and credibility across the web, rather than simply accumulating as many backlinks as possible.
Don’t neglect technical foundations
While AI search introduces new opportunities, the technical fundamentals of SEO remain just as important. Before a search engine or AI-powered experience can make use of your website’s content, it needs to be able to discover, crawl and process it. If your most important product and category pages are difficult to access, poorly structured, or not being indexed correctly, visibility is already at a disadvantage.
There are several technical areas worth reviewing:
- Crawlability and indexability: Make sure important landing pages can be discovered and accessed by relevant search engine crawlers. Review the site’s robots.txt file, XML sitemaps, canonical tags and indexation directives.
- Site architecture: Maintain a clear hierarchy that makes it easy to understand how products, categories and subcategories relate to one another.
- Internal linking: Use descriptive internal links to connect related categories, products, and supporting content, helping search engines to discover important pages and understand their relationships.
- Rendering: Ensure that important content and product information are accessible to search engines, particularly if your website relies heavily on JavaScript to render page content.
- Page experience: Monitor page speed, mobile usability and Core Web Vitals. A technically sound website creates a better experience for both users and the systems accessing your content.
It’s also worth reviewing crawler access policies. Different AI platforms and services use different crawlers, so understand which bots you want to allow access to your website and make sure your server and CDN configurations aren’t unintentionally restricting them.
Ultimately, good technical SEO isn’t something that needs to be reinvented for AI. It’s about making sure your website is accessible, understandable and easy to navigate.
Support commercial pages with long-form content
Not every potential customer is ready to purchase immediately. Some will be comparing different products, others will be researching a particular problem, while some may simply be looking for inspiration. A strong content strategy should account for all these different stages of the buying journey.
Supporting key commercial categories with useful, relevant editorial content can help to expand visibility beyond transactional searches. Content such as buying guides, product comparisons, ‘how-to’ articles, inspiration pieces, and answers to common customer questions can all help to support this.
For example, a retailer selling garden furniture could create content around choosing the right garden furniture for smaller spaces, comparing different materials, or preparing outdoor furniture for winter.
This type of content gives search engines and AI platforms more context around the products and categories you specialise in, while also providing useful information to potential customers earlier in their research.
However, it’s important that this content offers genuine value rather than simply targeting a large volume of keywords. Answer questions clearly, demonstrate relevant expertise, and include useful links to the products and categories being discussed.
By bolstering commercial landing pages with relevant informational content, you can create a more seamless journey: helping customers to discover your brand during their initial research whilst making it easier for them to find the right products when they’re ready to buy.
Keep product feeds up to date
One area that’s becoming increasingly important for ecommerce brands is the quality and availability of their product data outside their own website.
AI shopping experiences can use structured product information from a variety of sources, including merchant feeds and third-party providers. This means your website shouldn’t be the only place to be thinking about product data quality.
Platforms such as Google Merchant Center allow retailers to provide detailed product information through feeds, while newer AI shopping experiences are also developing their own product data integrations.
For example, OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol supports structured product feeds that help ChatGPT to access product catalogues, understand key attributes, and display up-to-date information such as prices and availability.
This makes feed management an important consideration for ecommerce businesses looking to improve their visibility across emerging shopping experiences.
Make sure your product feeds contain complete and accurate information, including:
- Product titles and descriptions
- Unique product identifiers, such as GTINs and SKUs where applicable
- Product images and relevant attributes
- Accurate pricing and promotional information.
- Accurate stock and availability details
- Correct product URLs and variant information
It’s also important to keep this information synchronised with what’s displayed to users on your website. Outdated prices, unavailable products or conflicting product descriptions can create a poor experience and undermine confidence in the information being presented.
Summary
AI is changing how people discover, research and purchase products online, creating new opportunities for ecommerce brands to reach customers throughout the buying journey.
However, preparing for AI shopping doesn’t mean starting your SEO strategy from scratch. Many of the areas that support AI visibility are the same fundamentals that have always mattered in ecommerce SEO: high-quality product information, strong technical foundations, relevant content, and a credible online presence.
The difference is that these elements now need to work together to make your products as easy as possible for AI platforms to discover, understand and recommend.
For ecommerce businesses, the real opportunity lies in moving beyond brand visibility alone and making sure the products that drive revenue are ready to be discovered, compared and purchased wherever customers choose to shop.
