Is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) Replacing SEO as the New Tail That Wags the Ecommerce Dog?

Ecommerce is entering the first era where educating shoppers matters more than driving traffic. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) isn’t an SEO replacement yet — but it is already changing how discovery, trust, and conversion work.

I recently attended a GEO conference in San Francisco. The term “dark art” references its origins in SEO, an industry often cloaked in mystery and manipulative tactics. While traditional SEO largely benefited shoppers only indirectly — mainly by making some products easier to find — GEO promises to force brands to share deeper product information and answer consumer questions directly.

How Will GEO Actually Benefit Consumers?

Shoppers are already using AI to find and learn about products. At the conference, participants acknowledged that site traffic is falling as consumers gather information upstream through AI chats. To ensure your products appear at the top of this funnel, you must provide enough context and detail to AI engines.

Under SEO, the goal was to lure users to your link and then educate them. Under GEO, the goal is to educate first so they decide to click. If you don’t feed AI engines enough product data, shoppers may never encounter your brand.

Your responsibility shifts from convincing Google that your products deserve a high rank — often through tactics that don’t benefit shoppers — to openly sharing detailed product information so AI can recommend your products to the right consumers. The job moves from generating clicks to educating shoppers — as it should.

How Important Is GEO to Ecommerce Today?

Right now, GEO traffic is still small — but it won’t stay that way. ChatGPT’s user base doubled from 400 million to around 800 million weekly users in early 2025. Early experiments show that generative engines drive a tiny fraction of traffic compared with Google. When Etsy joined the Agentic Commerce Protocol, its AI‑referred traffic increased several‑fold, yet it still represented only a small share of total traffic. However, AI adoption is accelerating faster than mobile web usage, and preparing for GEO will require a meaningful investment in infrastructure.

Do You Really Understand How GEO Differs from SEO?

While there are similarities between SEO and GEO, the differences are massive and foundational. Here are the key takeaways:

Results Come Faster with GEO

With SEO it takes months to move the needle on traffic. With AI, it can take hours — publishing new content can result in additional traffic in less than a day.

Recency Is Critical

SEO rewarded older, well‑linked content. In AI results, articles older than a year are rarely cited. Content less than three months old performs roughly three times better; adding a date on content can increase citations by ~1.8×.

The Funnel Has Changed

Organic traffic to most sites is declining because shoppers gather information in chat engines before visiting. They arrive better educated and more likely to convert — but only if you provide as much information and context to AI as possible.

Content Is Replacing Ad Spend

Instead of buying clicks, you now have to earn them by educating AI about your products so it can provide great answers. Brands need to invest more aggressively in content creation, even at the expense of CPC and other advertising.

Ultimately, the Truth Is Your Responsibility

Even though you can’t control what happens on generative engines, they now shape your conversion funnel. You must accept responsibility for the accuracy — or “grounding” — of your content on those engines. If the three‑sentence product description on your product detail page is all you provide, don’t expect AI to answer a shopper’s questions well — and, in many cases, it may hallucinate an answer, leading to costly returns.

What Will Happen to Shopper Discovery Over the Next Couple Years?

Today’s model of an LLM crawler visiting your site is interim. Discovery is rapidly evolving toward agent‑to‑agent communication — your product agent talking to the LLM’s agents. In this world, you will need to tell the LLM as much as possible about your products so it can answer shopper questions on your behalf.

How Can We Update the Content on Thousands of Products?

If you’re wondering how to enrich content for thousands of products, you’re not alone. The common workflow of writing a few sentences per product won’t meet consumer needs. With:

• Thousands of SKUs
• Dozens of attributes per product
• Multiple personas and use cases
• Continuous updates required for recency

manual approaches don’t scale. If you don’t provide that information, shoppers will gravitate to brands that do — or the LLMs will make up answers, and both scenarios are bad for your brand.

Fortunately, Brandfuel is built to support this new, more intense and more technical world of product content operations. GEO doesn’t require brands to do “new” things. It requires them to do what they should have been doing — at a scale and rigor they’ve never needed before. That’s an infrastructure problem, not a copywriting problem.

Ready to Prepare for the GEO Era?

Contact us to learn how Brandfuel can AI‑enable and enrich your product pipeline for this brave new world of the empowered shopper.