AEO is changing how brands get discovered online

When you search for a product on, say, ChatGPT and a brand shows up as an organic response, that’s AEO at work.

AEO—or answer engine optimization, sometimes also referred to as agentic engine optimization—is a relatively new acronym that has ended up firmly in retail circles ever since public AI surfaces became a popular way for people to search for and discover products online.

While SEO is traditionally the way to rank high in Google search results so users can find brands organically as they search for items—the SEO industry is worth more than $80 billion and is on track to more than double to more than $170 billion by 2030, according to data from MarkNtel Advisors—AEO is the technical layer that gets a brand mentioned in AI-generated answers. It’s the next iteration of what showing up in a Google search result used to be.

Now, AI-powered search is changing how people shop for and discover brands, alongside AEO and GEO (generative engine optimization), which some experts in the industry refer to interchangeably.

The next level: AI search is going mainstream, and fast. Half of consumers polled by McKinsey actively seek out AI-powered search engines, and most say it’s their top digital source when deciding what to buy. If that’s where shoppers are increasingly starting their search, and your brand isn’t in the answer, that’s…well, not ideal.

As Microsoft VP, Global Partner and Retail Media Lynne Kjolso put it, “everything that works in SEO continues to work in the age of large language models, but AEO is a set of additional practices so that you can really refine your content and make sure the content has what the large language models are looking for.”

For Andy Szanger, director of strategic industries at CDW, which builds tech stacks for retailers, SEO, GEO, and AEO are “three different answers to the same question: How does a consumer find your brand?”

“SEO got you found,” Szanger told Retail Brew via LinkedIn. “AEO gets you answered. GEO gets you recommended. The brands that treat those as three separate strategies will lose to the brands that build one integrated data foundation underneath all three.”

Szanger cited the example of Urban Outfitters, which during a session at NRF this year, discussed how it discovered some of its jeans weren’t showing up in AI searches simply because the word “jeans” never appeared in the product description.

“They either said ‘denim’ or had a brand name, but not the word ‘jeans,’ so they were not coming up as frequently in AI-based searches,” Szanger said.

If retailers today are missing from AI platforms, the stakes are higher.

“In SEO, being invisible meant you weren’t on Page 1, but consumers still had the option to find you,” Szanger said. “In GEO, being invisible means the AI never mentions you, and the consumer doesn’t know you were an option. That’s not a visibility problem you can solve with a bigger ad budget. It’s a data and content problem, and the window to fix it before AI discovery becomes the dominant channel is closing faster than most retailers realize.”

Coding in the wild west: Hitting a wall now would be worse for retailers because companies like ChatGPT parent OpenAI and Google are leaning into shopping in a big way.

In March, OpenAI added shopping directly into ChatGPT, giving users a way to search for and compare products without leaving the chat. Google, meanwhile, added new tools to help retailers show up in its own AI-powered search results.

“SEO was built around keywords, backlinks, and ad spend—signals that humans and algorithms could both interpret,” Szanger said. “AEO and GEO are fundamentally different. They are about data structure, brand clarity, and contextual authority. AI needs to know who a brand is, what it sells, and what it stands for across the web. AI ranks sources based on trust and relevance, not bid strategy.”