Ecommerce SEO in the Age of AI: 5 Tips To Keep Product Pages Ranking

For decades, search engine optimization (SEO) has been a critical strategy for companies looking to boost product page rankings and convert more customers. Ecommerce gave consumers nearly unlimited choices, so optimizing for search remained the best way to stay ahead of the competition.

Now, ecommerce SEO’s grip is slipping, thanks to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) — and its progeny, generative AI (GenAI). These tools have brought the dawn of a new age: generative engine optimization (GEO).

It’s no longer about reaching the top search engine results page (SERP) spot. Instead, brands need to ensure their content is cited in AI-generated answers to user questions.

Andreessen Horowitz says it best: “Traditional search was built on links. GEO is built on language.”

It’s a new era, and brands need to adapt if they want to stay ahead.

The Proliferation of GenAI

Generative AI has changed the game for brands and consumers alike — and it’s only just getting started.

According to Gartner, 30% of marketing messages will be personalized by GenAI this year, and 63% of companies have plans to invest in GenAI over the next two years.

This investment can’t come fast enough — as noted by a Bain & Company report, 80% of consumers now rely on AI results for 40% (or more) of their searches. The result is a 15% to 25% drop in organic web traffic for businesses.

Put simply, traditional SEO is no longer enough. To capture customer interest and keep consumers coming back, brands need a two-stage strategy that combines the best of familiar SEO practices with emerging generative operations.

5 Tips for Ecommerce SEO Success

There’s no perfect way to attract customer interest. Much like SEO before it, GEO is an ever-changing practice that depends on available tools, customer expectations, and the technological frameworks that popular search engines use.

Google’s “Panda” update, for example, aimed to reduce the volume of keyword stuffing. The update changed the nature of ecommerce SEO overnight, forcing companies to rethink their strategies and design new approaches. The result? SERPs that prioritized content rather than keyword counts, in turn creating content that was more valuable to viewers.

GEO is changing the game again. While content remains critical, context now plays a role in customer decision-making.

Here are five ecommerce SEO tips to help your brand stand out.

1. Keep Keywords – But Don’t Get Tunnel Vision

Keywords remain a critical part of product page optimization strategies. But there’s one caveat: They’re now part of a larger set of key search data.

Other components include:

• Metadata: Metadata is data about data. For product pages, this metadata helps improve the user experience by making it easy for customers to find what they’re looking for. Common types of product metadata include style, brand name, color, size, and materials.
• AI readability: AI-driven search bots look for well-structured and clear content to create SERP summaries. Product pages with too much exposition or unnecessary content won’t rank as highly as their more succinct counterparts.
• Relevance: Data must be relevant to the consumer to perform well in GEO. Relevance for products includes both timeliness and specificity. Is the product currently available? Does it closely match what customers were looking for in terms of shipping speed, price, and local availability?

Of these four GEO components, keywords rank at the bottom. While it’s worth spending time and effort identifying keywords that best fit your brand, and regularly updating those keywords to ensure they’re still relevant, make sure you don’t get tunnel vision. Focus too much on content, and you’ll miss the context.

2. Structure Content To Match AI Priorities

Unlike traditional search engine crawlers, which look for pages tagged with relevant keywords and locations, GenAI tools are more interested in how pages display data.

Intelligent tools consider three factors when evaluating product content:

• Readability: For content to score well, it must be easy to read. Avoid overly technical jargon or highly specific industry terms, and keep content short and to the point.
• Authority: Authority is tied to both clear, confident language and your webpages’ current rankings. If your business is just starting out, it may be more difficult to rank in AI search. Boost your reputation by creating consistent content that’s relevant to your customers’ needs.
• Accuracy: AI can now fact-check and cross-check data across multiple sources. If your content isn’t accurate, it won’t make the cut.

3. Use Rich Media To Boost Search Visibility

Rich media, such as images and videos, can help improve visibility by providing additional context. For example, consumers can now carry out image-based searches by simply highlighting items in an image. GenAI tools then search for relevant matches online.

According to Capgemini, 71% of consumers now want GenAI incorporated into their shopping experience — and brands are delivering. Companies are using rich media to create AI-driven shopping experiences that allow customers to virtually “try on” clothing or see what furniture would look like in their home.

Consider ecommerce company Stitch Fix, which combines AI-powered personalized product recommendations and human stylist expertise to provide customized clothing options.

4. Leverage AI To Stay Ahead of the SEO Competition

Gartner notes that, while GenAI excels at creating new content and providing a conversational experience for users, discriminative AI is much better at classifying customer segments and predicting purchase patterns.

This makes discriminative AI SEO tools ideal for finding and tracking new trends — and helping brands make the most of them. Consider an online clothing retailer that uses GEO to create a product page optimization strategy that helps them rank highly in AI-generated answer summaries.

These summaries are only useful, however, if customers are asking the right questions. When market trends start to shift, rankings naturally fall not because the company hasn’t done the work, but because customers aren’t looking for answers on that original topic.

Discriminative AI uses smaller training and data models than GenAI to produce targeted and relevant outputs. Using a discriminative model, the clothing retailer can pinpoint emerging trends and create GEO-friendly content to match. 

5. Make the Most of the Human Condition

Customers know the difference between AI- and human-created content.

Content created by AI SEO tools reads as slightly stilted, and it often uses strange or overly complex phrasing where simple structures are more effective. AI content also continues to run the risk of being confidently incorrect. AI answers depend entirely on available data, so if tools don’t have enough content or content is biased, it will serve up inaccurate information.

This creates an interesting (and ironic) scenario: Intelligent search tools typically prefer human-created content as the basis for AI-generated summaries. Ensure humans are behind your content, and your content will surely perform better.

SEO, AI, and the New Ecommerce Reality

As AI evolves, ecommerce SEO can only take your brand so far.

If ecommerce companies want to earn their spot as sources for AI-generated summaries, it’s not enough to have a great keyword strategy. Instead, they need to create relevant content that uses rich media to improve visibility, leverages discriminative AI to improve visibility, and incorporates human-created content to stand out from the crowd.

AI is growing and changing every day, so it’s critical for brands to keep pace. In this new ecommerce reality, now’s the time to adapt.