The SEO and GEO Playbook for 2026: 5 Experts Reveal What Actually Works Now

The rules of search have changed. And most eCommerce brands haven’t caught up.

Here’s a number that should make you pause: 90% of ChatGPT citations for the same query rank beyond page 3 of Google. Not page 1. Not page 2. Beyond page 3.

That means the SEO playbook you’ve been running for years? It’s still important. But it’s no longer enough.

AI bots don’t search the way Google does. They search with math. Vectors. Embeddings. They don’t care about your carefully built backlink profile. They care about structure, clarity, and whether your content actually answers the question.

Welcome to the era of SEO meets GEO. And over the course of five episodes, we sat down with five experts who are already winning in this new landscape. What they shared is a complete masterclass on how to make your eCommerce store visible, not just to Google, but to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and whatever comes next.

Let’s get into it.

First, Stop Doing the Things That Hurt You

Before you build anything new, you need to stop doing what is actively working against you.

That’s exactly where Iva Jovanovic, SEO and content strategist, took us in Episode 294. And some of what she flagged will have you racing to check your own site.

The big ones? Keyword stuffing. Hidden text. Doorway pages. Cloaking. These aren’t just outdated tactics. They’re actively harmful. Google’s algorithms have become sophisticated enough to detect them, and the penalties are real. But here’s what caught our attention: some of these mistakes happen accidentally. A site migration gone wrong. An old agency’s work that nobody ever cleaned up. Duplicate content that crept in over the years of adding products.

Iva’s advice is direct. Invest in SEO continuously. The brands she’s seen stop investing? Within six or seven months, there’s a dramatic flatline from high numbers to almost nothing.

And here’s her take on where things are headed: the rise of LLMs and AI search is real, but it’s still a small percentage of overall traffic. Her crystal ball advice? Don’t chase the shiny new thing at the expense of fundamentals. Build a strong technical foundation first. Get your site architecture right. Because when the AI bots come crawling, and they will, that foundation is exactly what they’ll reward.

Your move: Audit your site for legacy SEO mistakes. Check for duplicate content, broken redirects, and outdated tactics that might be dragging you down. Fix the foundation before building anything new.

Now, Optimise for the Bots That Actually Matter

With the foundation clean, it’s time to talk about what’s new. And Emily Richardson, founder of KNWN, delivered one of the clearest breakdowns of AI search optimisation we’ve heard.

Emily splits it into two categories: on-site and off-site. The distinction matters because of control. On-site changes? You can make them today. Off-site? That’s a longer game, but it pays dividends.

On-site, here’s what the AI bots want:

Structure. Start every piece of content with a summary. AI bots hit a page, and they’re scanning the first few sentences to decide if it’s worth going deeper. If your content buries the lead, you lose them immediately.

Then there’s chunking. Short paragraphs. Bullet points. Clear subheadings. No run-on walls of text. The AI is parsing your content mathematically. Make it easy.

And here’s a stat that reframes everything: the average Google search is 4 words. The average AI search query? 27 words. That’s not a small difference. That’s an entirely different type of question. Emily’s solution is straightforward. Add FAQ sections to your pages. Product pages, category pages, and content pages. Answer the long-tail questions your customers are already asking, because those are exactly the queries AI is fielding.

One more thing that surprised us: AI bots can’t render JavaScript. If your product details, reviews, or key information are hidden behind JavaScript toggles, the AI simply doesn’t see it. Check your robots.txt file too. If it says “disallow” next to ClaudeBot, OpenAI Bot, or PerplexityBot, you’ve literally locked the door on AI search traffic.

Off-site, the game is completely different from traditional SEO.

AI bots don’t use backlinks. They use keyword mentions. Your brand doesn’t need to be linked in an article to get credit from AI search. It just needs to be mentioned. That opens up entirely new strategies around PR, industry publications, and getting your brand name into the conversations AI is pulling from.

Emily’s compass for all of this? Citations. Go into ChatGPT or Claude, ask the queries you want to rank for, and look at what’s being cited. That tells you exactly which websites to target, what content formats AI prefers, and where your gaps are.

And for specific platforms: YouTube content matters enormously for Gemini. Reddit is becoming a primary source for community-driven answers. If you have a Wikipedia page, it needs to be current.

Your move: Start with on-site structure today. Summaries at the top. FAQ sections at the bottom. Clean HTML, no hidden JavaScript content. Then check your ChatGPT citations to map your off-site strategy.

Get Your Product Data Right (Or Nothing Else Matters)

This is the episode that made us sit up and take notice.

Sam Wright, Managing Director at Blink SEO, has been in eCommerce since 2002 and in SEO since 2007. He works with large-catalogue Shopify stores. And his message is blunt: if your product data isn’t right, everything else you do for AI search is built on sand.

Here’s how Sam frames it. AI pulls product information from multiple sources and displays it in isolation. Your brand context gets stripped away. The customer might never see your website. So how do you compete? You make your data richer, deeper, and more detailed than anyone else’s.

For Shopify stores, there’s a specific playbook. Shopify has been building what Sam calls “the plumbing” for AI search. The Shopify standard taxonomy. The catalog mapping tool. Knowledge Base for FAQs. The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) with Google. All of these are mechanisms for feeding your product data into AI in a structured, machine-readable way.

But here’s the insight that elevated this from tactical to strategic: everyone on Shopify has access to the same base tools. Everyone can fill in material, price, colour, and standard attributes. So where’s the competitive advantage? Depth.

Sam gave us a perfect example. They work with a dog food brand. When people ask AI, “What’s the best dog food in this category?” the AI doesn’t just look at the product name and price. It examines the price per gram of protein. Composition of ingredients. Sourcing details. The brands with that level of granular data in their product fields are the ones AI recommends.

And here’s the number that makes this impossible to ignore: Sam says that when they overhaul a store’s taxonomy and product data, they typically see organic revenue double within 12 months. Not from link building. Not from content marketing. Just from making the store richer, deeper, and easier for both humans and machines to navigate.

His crystal ball? This Q4 will be the first peak season where AI shopping is real. The work you do now to get your data ready positions you to capture that demand.

Your move: Treat Shopify as your single source of truth. Fill in every standard field. Go deeper with product attributes. Use the catalog mapping tool. Build out Knowledge Base FAQs. Get your data into a format that AI can actually use.

Your Category Pages Are Probably Doing Too Much

Now we move from product data to the pages that sit between your homepage and your products. The category pages. PLPs. Collection pages. Whatever you call them.

Liv Day, SEO Lead at Digitaloft, came with a case study that cuts right to the heart of what’s changed.

She had a bed retailer. They’d been ranking in position 1 for months. Then suddenly, they dropped to position 7. Not catastrophic, but enough to feel it. The problem? Their category pages had about 2,000 words of content. Content like “what is a bed” and “the history of beds.”

Liv’s team cut it to 500 words. Kept the content focused on helping someone make a purchase decision. Within days, they were back in position 1. Clicks up 51%.

The lesson is clear. On category pages, maximum value does not mean maximum information. It means the right information. Tightly focused. Relevant to the buying decision. Short enough that Google (and AI) recognises this as a commercial page, not an informational essay.

What should you have on those pages? Internal linking is at the top of Liv’s list. Not random links. Strategic links that create a clear hierarchy. Subcategory blocks at the top of the page so users (and crawlers) can navigate deeper. Reciprocal linking between parent and child categories. And for the love of SEO, use keyword-rich anchor text, not “click here.”

Liv also flagged a quick Shopify fix that takes five minutes but strengthens your entire internal linking structure: fixing non-canonical URLs in your product grids. By default, Shopify links products through the collection path rather than the direct product URL, diluting your link equity. Digitaloft has a blog walkthrough on exactly how to fix it.

On the GEO side, Liv says product pages are currently more important for AI search than category pages. But you can still optimise category pages by adding FAQ sections with the long-tail questions people are actually typing into ChatGPT and Reddit.

Speaking of Reddit: it’s now more widely used than TikTok, according to Ofcom. And AI search engines love community-generated content. Liv’s team has started exporting Reddit threads from their clients’ industries, pulling out long-tail queries, and ensuring those questions are answered on the site.

Your move: Audit the word counts on your category page. If you’re over 1,000 words, you’re probably overdoing it. Cut to what helps the buying decision. Fix your internal linking hierarchy. And check the URLs in your Shopify product grid.

The Three Pillars That Tie It All Together

For the final episode in the series, Amanda Walls, founder of award-winning agency Cedarwood Digital, gave us the framework that connects everything.

She calls it the three pillars of helpful content: product pages, trust pages, and category pages. And the principle that runs through all three is deceptively simple. Match the user’s intent.

On product pages, that means giving users what they need to complete a purchase. Delivery information. Returns policy. Product specifications. Reviews. Amanda isn’t worried about duplicate content here. Google understands that delivery and returns information will be the same across product pages. What matters is that the information is there, in text (not graphics), and clearly accessible.

On trust pages, specifically About Us and Contact Us, Amanda says they’re among the most underrated pages on an eCommerce site. About Us builds the entity behind the brand. Contact Us builds the confidence that if something goes wrong, there’s a real human to reach. Together, they send powerful E-E-A-T signals to both Google and AI search engines. Her advice? Put a person behind the brand. Include a phone number or live chat. And critically, don’t bury these pages in the footer. Put About Us in your main navigation. Put “Contact Us” in the top-right corner, where people naturally look.

On category pages, Amanda reinforces what Liv told us: keep the content concise. A mix of informational and transactional. Add a few FAQs. Don’t overload.

And then there’s blogs. Amanda’s take is refreshingly direct: blog if it adds value. Don’t blog for traffic. She’s seen eCommerce sites creating content about products they don’t even sell, just to attract tangential traffic. The result? It confuses Google’s understanding of what your site is about and creates a terrible user experience when someone lands on a guide for a product you can’t actually sell them. Her second most common activity in the last 12 months? Auditing and removing blog content.

The GEO connection here is powerful. AI doesn’t think in keywords. It thinks in semantics, entities, and relationships. When your content clearly matches a user’s intent, AI can accurately extract and surface it. When it’s cluttered with irrelevant information, the AI gets confused, just like the user does.

Your move: Evaluate your site against the three pillars. Are your product pages answering purchase-stage questions? Do your About Us and Contact Us pages build genuine trust? Are your category pages concise and conversion-focused? And does your blog actually add value, or is it time for a cull?

The Masterclass in One Page

Here’s what emerges when you stack these five expert perspectives together:

1. Clean up first. Remove legacy SEO mistakes, thin content, and anything that’s actively hurting you. (Iva, Episode 294)
2. Structure for AI. Summaries at the top. FAQ sections at the bottom. Clean HTML. Let the bots in. (Emily, Episode 295)
3. Deepen your data. Rich product data is the new competitive moat. Go deeper than your competitors on every attribute. (Sam, Episode 296)
4. Trim your category pages. Less is more. Focus on the buying decision. Fix your internal linking. (Liv, Episode 297)
5. Match the intent. Product pages for transactions. Trust pages for confidence. Category pages for browsing. Blogs only if they earn their place. (Amanda, Episode 298)

The brands that act on this now have a window of opportunity. AI search is still evolving. The first-mover advantage is real. And every single one of these actions also improves your traditional SEO and your customer experience.

That’s not a gamble. That’s a no-brainer.

This article is part of the Keep Optimising SEO & GEO series. Listen to all five episodes:

• Episode 294: Iva Jovanovic on Bad SEO Practices to Avoid
• Episode 295: Emily Richardson on On-Site and Off-Site AI Search Optimisation
• Episode 296: Sam Wright on Product Data and Taxonomy for AI Search
• Episode 297: Liv Day on Category Page SEO Dos and Don’ts
• Episode 298: Amanda Walls on the 3 Pillars of Helpful Content

Find all episodes at KeepOptimising.com

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