What Is GEO and Does an Online Store Need It?

GEO, short for generative engine optimization, is the work of getting a brand named or cited in answers from AI products such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews. For an online store, it is best treated as an extension of SEO, not a separate discipline.

How GEO differs from SEO

SEO is measured by rankings and clicks for a keyword. GEO is measured by how often your brand shows up when many different people ask a question in their own words, and by which pages the AI cites when it answers.

The work overlaps heavily. Tools that search the web as they answer, such as Perplexity, ChatGPT search and Google AI Overviews, retrieve pages. A store that cannot be crawled or indexed will not be retrieved, so technical SEO still comes first.

Which pages AI tools tend to cite for product questions

For questions like “best running shoes for flat feet”, the cited pages are often roundup articles, review sites, forum threads and brand pages. We have not seen a published, reliable breakdown of the weights, and the mix changes by product and by tool. The practical step is to test your own category and see what gets cited.

A simple test: write ten questions a buyer would ask, run each one three times in each tool, and note which brands and URLs appear. Answers vary from run to run, so a single result tells you little.

What you can do about it

Start with the basics that also help SEO. Make sure your product and collection pages are indexed and load their content without needing a user to click. Use accurate Product and Organization structured data. Check that robots.txt does not block the search crawlers of the tools you care about.

Then look at the pages the tools cite for your category. If the same three roundup articles appear again and again, getting your product reviewed in them matters more than publishing another post on your own site.

Finally, keep your brand details consistent across your site, your social profiles and any marketplace listings, so a model that finds you in several places reads the same facts.

What nobody can promise

No agency or tool can guarantee a mention in a given AI product. Models give different answers by run, by user and over time. A fair way to judge GEO work is the share of test prompts where your brand appears, tracked monthly, alongside referral traffic from these tools in your analytics.

If you want a baseline for your store, request a free audit and we will run your category prompts across the major tools.