Organic ecommerce search engine optimization (SEO) used to be all about getting your product pages to the top of the famous ten blue links. The assumption was that if you achieved that, then your store would get the click-through and the chance of a sale.
However, Google has been chipping away at the primacy of the blue links for many years. Rich search features such as Featured Snippets and People Also Ask display information that would once have been accessible only on linked-to sites. Generative AI takes that tendency to the next level.
Many searches in Google and Bing are now zero-click searches. AI summaries and AI Mode provide sufficient information that users no longer have to click through to the source website. Beyond search engines, AI apps like ChatGPT and Claude are becoming central to how shoppers research products.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), also known as AI SEO or Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), is about ensuring that your products have a place in AI conversations, whether at the top of Google results or in AI chat apps. The good news is that the traditional SEO basics are the foundation of effective GEO. But there are key differences ecommerce store owners need to understand.
In this article, we are going to explore six tips to prepare your WooCommerce site for effective generative engine optimization.
AI search has the potential to revolutionize how shoppers approach product research and selection. A shopper can now ask Google’s AI Mode, “What are the best running shoes for marathon training?” Gemini, Google’s AI, will carry out multiple searches, collate the results, and display summaries with links.
Most of the information Gemini uses comes from review and comparison pages, but the results also include links to ecommerce product pages, which rely on structured data and the Google Product Feed.
It’s worth asking whether shoppers are, in fact, using AI for product searches. In Google, they have little choice. AI summaries appear at the top of many search engine results pages. AI Mode is easily accessible and more prominently displayed than the traditional “Shopping” results pages, which also include AI-generated recommendations with product images and links.
For AI chat apps like ChatGPT and Claude, we can be more precise. OpenAI recently published How People Use ChatGPT, a research paper that reports real-world use patterns. According to the paper, between May 2024 and June 2025, purchasable products accounted for 2.6% of all ChatGPT conversations.
That’s a lower number than you might expect, but it’s worth keeping in mind that by mid-2025, ChatGPT’s 700 million users were sending more than 18 billion messages every week. The 2.6% represents a small proportion of total ChatGPT use, but it amounts to tens of millions of product-related messages per day.
OpenAI’s recent introduction of Instant Checkout in ChatGPT and the Agentic Commerce Protocol further underlines the importance of AI optimization. Instant Checkout allows ChatGPT users to buy directly within AI apps. At the time of writing, Instant Checkout supports Etsy, with Shopify support in the works, but availability will likely broaden over time to include WooCommerce and other platforms.
If your store and products aren’t part of the LLM’s training data or search indexes, you’re opting out of this new way of buying. Your products will not be presented to shoppers who prefer to discover products in LLM-powered conversational interfaces.
It might seem that structured data matters less for generative engine optimization. After all, AI summaries work by putting page copy into a large language model’s (LLM) context and prompting for a summary. But page content is only part of the information AI summaries use.
Google’s rich results depend on structured data, and that information is also used to inform AI responses. Structured data helps search engines understand product information and its relevance to queries. Search results then affect whether and how products are highlighted in AI responses.
Audit your site to ensure every product has complete schema markup with the name, price, availability, and ratings. It’s just as important to make sure that schema markup matches the page’s visible text. Disparities can confuse search engines and deny pages a place in the results.
WooCommerce makes it easy to get structured data onto your product pages. It automatically generates basic JSON-LD structured data for products, including essential schema markup for product information, pricing, and availability. You can also use plugins like Yoast SEO or RankMath, which provide additional schema markup options and allow you to customize the structured data output.
As mentioned earlier, much of the information AI apps use in summaries and chats is drawn from reviews, comparisons, Reddit posts, and similar sources. That happens because of how AI implements search. When a user enters a conversational question in an AI search app, the LLM generates several suitable queries, searches for them, and integrates the resulting pages into its context. It makes sense that SEO-optimized reviews and listicles form the bulk of that context.
To be included, your site also needs content that ranks for those queries. One of the best ways to achieve that is to use WordPress to publish hub and spoke content optimized for relevant queries. If you’re selling running shoes, publish pages optimized for “best running shoes,” “running shoes for women,” and so on.
In essence, you will implement a traditional content marketing and SEO strategy following standard keyword best practices.
Google’s AI features use the same indexes and ranking algorithms as traditional search. The basic rules of search engine optimization apply, including Google’s quality guidelines, which emphasize the importance of E-E-A-T.
For ecommerce merchants, implementing E-E-A-T means:
Learn more about how to implement E-E-A-T in our comprehensive guide.
Just like Google, AI companies crawl the web with bots to understand and index content. Over the last couple of years, the number of bots has soared, so much so that they can be a significant resource drain. However, if you want your products to appear in AI search, it is counterproductive to block OpenAI, Claude, or Bing’s crawlers.
Ensure your WooCommerce store’s robots.txt file allows crawling for these bots. Configure security systems and firewalls to give them access. If you use Cloudflare, it may automatically block AI crawlers and stop them from seeing your content. That makes sense for some content sites, but rarely for ecommerce stores. Check your Cloudflare configuration to whitelist crawling by the main AI services.
Once again, generative engine optimization is similar to traditional search engine optimization, where product pages are concerned. Ensure you have detailed product descriptions that include key specifications, benefits, and use cases. Write clear, descriptive titles that include relevant keywords naturally.
Focus on creating comprehensive product information that answers common customer questions. Include details about materials, dimensions, compatibility, and care instructions. This information helps traditional search engines and AI systems understand what your products are and when to recommend them.
Use natural language that matches how customers actually search and ask questions about products. Instead of keyword-stuffed descriptions, write conversational copy that flows naturally while still including important search terms.
Generative engine optimization tools are in their infancy. For traditional SEO, we have tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs to track keywords. These tools exist for GEO, and it’s worth experimenting with them. But one of the best ways to find out whether your products are included in AI chat results is to chat with an AI.
Ask ChatGPT and its competitors about your products. Find out what the main LLMs know, and more importantly, what they don’t know. What’s missing? Are your competitors’ products more easily picked up for relevant queries? Conducting this sort of ad hoc GEO audit can help you identify blind spots in your content coverage.
If you find that your competitors are more likely to appear for specific questions, write and publish keyword-optimized content that answers them. AIs only know what you tell them, so it’s vital to make sure that your site has broad and deep content coverage for relevant topics and subtopics.
We’ve emphasized that GEO is in many ways similar to SEO. That’s also true where performance and availability are concerned. The search engines that power AI’s search capabilities prefer fast, responsive, and always available websites.
Pressable’s managed WooCommerce hosting helps ecommerce merchants to meet those standards with an auto-scaling cloud platform, a 100% uptime guarantee, and a global content delivery network.
Schedule a demonstration today.
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