The short answer to the question posed by the title of this article is yes – but let’s offer some exposition.
You already know that an eCommerce SEO agency can get you to show up in the search results. That’s primarily what they do.
But with more people flocking to AI powered models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Grok, is it possible that an eCommerce SEO agency can get you to show up in one of them?
As it turns out, they can, given one caveat. The agency in question has to be content forward.
It’s All About the Ranking Signals
A trend that’s been emerging in the digital marketing world is that websites that have a strong organic presence tend to populate in AI engines like ChatGPT.
This is because all of these things are related. The higher a website’s domain authority is, and the better overall SEO score it has, the more AI engines will have to draw from when providing outputs.
As it turns out, there is one major ranking signal that is central to both SEO and AI optimization: content.
There are others that will influence both SEO and AEO, but there is nothing as important as content, period.
No website will perform well in the long term, not in the organic search results at least, if it has not published useful content that improves its perceived authority. The same is true for outputs through AI engines.
Now, the first thing to note here is that, as a result, for a website to rank effectively with the help of an eCommerce SEO agency, the agency has to have an SEO content-forward approach.
That is effectively the only way it will be able to generate results that stand the test of time, as truly content that performs in the long run will continue to generate organic success long after it has been published. For organic eCommerce marketing, there is not better way.
Answer engines also primarily utilize content that’s succinct and accurate in order to generate their outputs, directly. But what they also do is scrape the search results for information before synthesizing their own results.
So even if it were not the case that generative AI relied on preexisting copy that was optimized for it, it remains true that AI engines use the same ranking factors as search engines, indirectly, since they use search results as a source.
Therefore the long and short of this is that if you work with an eCommerce SEO agency that relies heavily on content for its strategies, there’s better than a good chance that it will be able to optimize your website for AI engines as well.
Working with an eCommerce SEO Agency for AI Optimization
With all of this being said and done, let’s not use sight of the fact that Google is still getting more than 8 billion searches per day, and ChatGPT is getting more than 2 billion.
It’s not like no one is using Google anymore. At least for now, it seems as though Google gets 4 times or so the traffic that ChatGPT gets.
Still, considering the fact that many AI engines and Google use the same or related ranking signals, optimizing for Google will help you with the others, and can help you capitalize on more than one channel.
This just adds a new dimension to the reasoning that it’s so important to invest in organic marketing. SEO has long been the best marketing channel for long-term results and return on investment, and as it is becoming central to AI optimization, that fact is not going to change anytime soon.
