Guides: getting your store into AI answers
Each guide answers one question store owners actually ask. The answer comes first, then the reasoning and the steps. To see where your own store stands, run a free check.
- What is GEO, and how is it different from SEO?GEO gets your store cited when ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews or Perplexity answer a shopper. Most of the groundwork is SEO. Three parts are new.
- How AI assistants decide which stores to mentionAI assistants search live, split questions into narrower searches and quote pages they can read. What decides if your store is picked, and what you control.
- How long until a new page shows up in Google and AI answers?Google says crawling takes a few days to a few weeks, with no guarantee. No AI company publishes a timeline. What to expect, and what you can do meanwhile.
- Long-tail questions: why small stores can win themLong-tail questions come with a budget, use case or model attached. Few people ask each one, but they are close to buying, and big brands rarely answer them.
- Can AI crawlers reach your store? How to checkAI assistants have to read your pages before they can cite them. Check robots.txt, your CDN's AI bot settings and the status code a crawler gets. Real commands.
- Shopify Agentic Storefronts: what store owners should checkShopify sends eligible products to ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Meta by default. Check three things: your Agentic settings, product data and store policies.
- How to write a store page that AI answers will quoteOne real shopper question per page: answer first, specs and prices in text, sourced numbers, honest downsides, a comparison table and a dated update line.
- How to check whether AI recommends your storeAsk the same 20 buyer questions every week in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google, Gemini and Copilot, and log mentions and citations. One screenshot proves nothing.
- Does llms.txt matter for an online store?As of Oct 8, 2026, no major AI search engine says it reads your llms.txt, and Google says it ignores it. Cheap to add, but don't expect it to move AI answers.
- Does structured data help with AI answers?Structured data puts prices, stock and stars in Google results, but Google says AI answers need no special markup. What each type does, and how to check yours.
- Reddit, YouTube and AI answers: how to take part honestlyAI answers lean on forums, videos and review sites, not just your store. How to show up there: real identity, real questions, disclosed ties, no sock puppets.
- How to choose a GEO provider and what the contract should sayRed flags (promised rankings, unlabeled paid posts, link buying), questions to ask, and six contract clauses that keep a GEO provider honest and measurable.