What is AEO?
Agentic Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the practice of structuring product data so AI shopping agents — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot — can accurately read, compare, and recommend your products. Unlike traditional SEO which targets search engine crawlers, AEO targets language models that process structured data to generate purchase recommendations.
Why AEO matters for Shopify stores
AI agents don't browse your storefront. They read your product data programmatically — titles, descriptions, structured markup, pricing, GTINs, images. Every gap in your data is a reason for an agent to skip your product and recommend a competitor instead.
The average Shopify store has 40+ data quality issues per product. Missing GTINs, thin descriptions, absent Schema.org markup, no FAQ structured data. Each issue reduces your visibility to AI-powered shopping assistants.
The 14-factor AEO scoring model
OptAEO's scoring model evaluates products across 14 factors that determine AI agent visibility. 86% of the score comes from local factors you control directly (data completeness, description quality, structured markup, image coverage). 14% comes from competitive positioning (how your data compares to category benchmarks).
How OptAEO improves your AEO score
Connect your Shopify store and OptAEO scans every product in under 60 seconds. You get an AEO score per product and per store, plus specific AI-generated fixes for each issue found. Apply fixes individually or in bulk — descriptions are enriched, GTINs inferred, FAQ markup generated, images analysed. Scores update in real-time.
Four AI engines work together: Claude Haiku for descriptions, GPT-4o-mini for meta content, Gemini Flash for image analysis, and Perplexity for competitive scoring. This multi-model approach ensures no single AI bias affects your optimisation.
AEO vs SEO
SEO optimises for search engine ranking algorithms. AEO optimises for language model comprehension. The overlap is real — structured data, complete metadata, and quality content help both. But AEO adds factors that SEO ignores: how well an AI can parse your product attributes, whether your data is machine-readable enough for comparison shopping, and whether emerging protocols like llms.txt and agents.txt are present.
Think of it this way: SEO gets you ranked. AEO gets you recommended.