For years (decades?) the world of ecommerce was largely focused on building an idealized experience to optimize site experience for shoppers or for SEO. The practitioners know this struggle intimately — having wrestled with it for literally the past two decades.
How do we write descriptions that sell…but also drive traffic?
Now there is a new front in this conversation: How will Generative Engine Optimization (aka AI chat or GEO) and Artificial Intelligence Optimization (AIO) be stirred into the mix?
The logical starting point is that it will look a lot like SEO — driven by the product data published to consumer shopping sites, but structured to be easily discoverable by AI crawlers. Because that is how SEO works.
The flaw is that both sites and SEO are based on human consumption of content based on a brand’s framing of their value. Google didn’t reframe or rephrase your content, even if they judged it.
In an AI world, how a brand wants to deliver messaging and product positioning isn’t nearly as relevant. GEO means generative engine — they are generating the narrative about your products. They’ll ingest your content (and product data!) and “generate” their own messaging.
Scary?
If you aren’t a little unsettled that fewer and fewer of what people read about your products and brands will actually be written by you, you probably should be.
This world presents a new paradigm: Does what you say about your products on Shopify really matter? If AI is generating all your content, isn’t AI eventually going to generate its own content based off your data, regardless of what you publish?
The answer is “yes.”
Some startups like Overway are pioneering “AI sites” — stripped-down data feeds built for AI crawlers. That solves for facts, but raises a bigger question: what happens to the brand voice?
On the surface, a specialized approach makes sense. AI is interested in the facts, not how you message your consumers. But if you are a true believer in the soul of a brand, as we are at Brandfuel, doesn’t direct publishing of product facts, absent the aspiration, language and experience, undermine the very nature of merchandising?
At Brandfuel we don’t claim to have the answer to this question. Nor do we claim to know where it all will end up. But we continue to be inspired by the voice of our customer brands to infuse their products with the life that makes them special.
Our platform is built to blend your brand, your product content and data with the narrative you want to overlay. Retaining your narrative is critical.
We don’t know where this all will end up…but we do know two things:
The thing to focus on now is putting in place the infrastructure to support whatever direction things head. Key capabilities include:
So the short answer is to build a system that is structured for technology but built to ensure you can maintain and reinforce your brand narrative. That’s what makes you special.
If you believe the soul of your brand shouldn’t be surrendered to a crawler, let’s talk. We’d love to explore how to protect and amplify your voice with you.
We don’t have the answers, but we’re here to work with you as you navigate both the realities and the opportunities of AI.
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Andy Lloyd is the CEO of Brandfuel and a veteran of e-commerce content operations. At Fluid, he helped brands deliver great brand experiences through superior UX design. At NetSuite, he led all commerce strategy and execution, supporting a unified customer journey across channels that ensured the front end customer experience aligned with the back end inventory and systems of record. He has spent over two decades helping brands optimize their product content for better customer experiences and higher conversion rates.
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