Learn how agents shop.

AEO and GEO: the short version.

Agent Engine Optimization (AEO)

AEO is the practice of making your product data readable and trustworthy to AI shopping assistants. Where SEO targets search-engine crawlers, AEO targets agents that read structured data, price feeds, and discovery files to answer shoppers' questions. The signals are different: GTINs, schema.org markup, and plain-language descriptions matter more than keyword density.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

GEO extends AEO to generative answer engines such as Perplexity and ChatGPT. These systems sample from across the web, then synthesize a recommendation. Being cited in that synthesis requires your product pages to have clear facts an LLM can extract without ambiguity: prices with currencies, materials, sizes, and a description that answers the most common questions about the product without hedging.

Discovery files

Shopify automatically generates a generic agents.md and llms.txt at each store's root. Your job is not to create these files but to customize them: a store-specific version served via app proxy tells agents what your brand sells, what makes it different, and which products to highlight. We do not claim a customized file wins you citations: we have not measured that, and nobody has published a study we would trust.