Over the past year, a new acronym has begun circulating in marketing circles: AEO, or AI Engine Optimization. It’s positioned as the successor to SEO — a way to make your content more “discoverable” inside large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity.

Some vendors are already pitching AEO as the next big battleground for brands.

But when you look beneath the hype, one conclusion becomes obvious:

AEO is nowhere near mature enough to justify real investment today — and the economics simply don’t work.

Yet ironically, while AEO itself isn’t ready…
Shopify merchants can already start getting their products listed inside LLMs in a real, meaningful way.

Here’s the full breakdown.

1. AEO Data Isn’t Authoritative or Verified

Unlike SEO, which relies on authoritative sources like Google Search Console, AEO tools are built on third-party inference data. They are not receiving structured ranking or citation data directly from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or Meta.

This creates an immediate limitation:

You cannot know with certainty whether your content influenced an LLM’s answer, because the LLMs themselves do not expose those signals.

Early SEO tools in the 2000s had similar challenges — lots of noise, very little verified insight. AEO today is in exactly that stage.

2. LLMs Rarely Surface Vendor Content — Even If They Use It

Most people imagine AEO as “getting our brand mentioned in AI answers.”

But that’s not how LLMs work.

LLMs tend to rely on authoritative, standards-based, or scientific sources — not vendor literature. In industries like ours (e.g., laser safety), models overwhelmingly prefer sources such as:

ANSI Z136 standards
Well-established technical bodies
Peer-reviewed research
Industry consensus documents

Even if an LLM reads your content during training, that does not mean:

It will cite you
It will prefer your product line
It will generate traffic or revenue for your business

The vast majority of LLM interactions are not recommendation queries. People ask for explanations, definitions, workflows, code, summaries, and general information. Very few queries result in specific vendor recommendations.

And when they do, the model prefers neutral sources — not companies with a commercial interest.

So even if you write the best content in the world, the reward loop that existed in SEO (rank → traffic → monetization) simply does not exist in LLMs today.

3. AEO Tactics Will Almost Certainly Become Obsolete

A lot of AEO advice today mirrors old, draconian SEO tactics:

Hyper-literal URL structures
Overly keyword-stuffed headers
Mechanically formatted content for machine readability

This is exactly what SEO looked like 15 years ago.

But LLMs evolve exponentially faster than search engines ever did.

Within a year or two, models will overwhelmingly prefer:

High-quality writing
Clear structure
Accurate information
Rich supporting metadata

Meaning: all the “hacks” today’s AEO tools sell will become irrelevant the moment models improve their reasoning and retrieval capabilities.

You shouldn’t rebuild your content architecture around something that is almost guaranteed to become obsolete.

4. The Economics Don’t Make Sense — Yet

This part often gets overlooked.

AEO tools are expensive.
They price themselves like SEO platforms but provide a fraction of the insight.

And the most reputable player in the category — the one backed by Sequoia Capital — was only founded in late 2024.

That doesn’t mean the space isn’t interesting. It simply means:

The ecosystem is extremely young
Standards don’t exist yet
The technology hasn’t stabilized
No one knows what signals will matter in 12–18 months

Buying into a tool category this early is essentially speculative.

5. So How Do Shopify Brands Get Their Products Into LLMs Today?

Here’s the part marketers don’t realize:

You don’t need AEO tools to get your products into ChatGPT and other LLM ecosystems.
You just need structured product data and the right integrations.

Today, there are three proven pathways:

Pathway A: Shopify → Google Merchant Center → Google AI Ecosystem

When you sync Shopify with Google Merchant Center, you’re already feeding structured, schema-rich, product-level data into Google’s ecosystem.

This data is used in:

Google Shopping
Search Results
Google’s internal knowledge graph
Google Gemini’s retrieval system

Meaning: your products become part of Gemini’s grounding data.

No AEO tool required.

Pathway B: Shopify → Pinterest / TikTok / Meta → OpenAI & Anthropic Through Partnership Pipelines

OpenAI and Anthropic both rely heavily on partnership-grounded data, especially for commerce and product discovery.

Several of these partners (Pinterest, Instacart, Shopify apps, etc.) feed product metadata through their own APIs, which LLMs use for:

retrieval
product category reasoning
price normalization
attribute matching
brand recognition

If your Shopify store exports clean structured data to these platforms, you’re already participating in the LLM ecosystem.

**Pathway C: The Newest (and Fastest-Growing) Channel:

ChatGPT Plugins, GPTs, and Commerce Connectors**

OpenAI now allows:

GPTs with external data
Product feed integrations
Approved commerce connectors
Brand-specific retrieval systems
Action-based commerce flows

This means your Shopify products can appear in ChatGPT queries through:

public GPTs
private business GPTs
partner GPT ecosystems
Shopify-connected GPT assistants

This is the direct future of "AI commerce."

And you can join it now by:

Maintaining clean product data (titles, descriptions, attributes)
Publishing structured feeds
Connecting your store via approved integrations
Ensuring metadata richness (which LLMs do use)

Again: no AEO needed.
Just clean data + structured feeds + the right connectors.

The Smart Strategy for 2025: Invest in Durable Foundations, Not Hype

Instead of chasing AEO trends, focus on the fundamentals that will matter long-term:

✔ Clean, logical site structure
✔ Clear product names and attributes
✔ High-quality content
✔ Properly labeled metadata
✔ Fast, modern theme performance
✔ Schema-rich product feeds
✔ Strong customer experience

These are the same things that made Shopify stores win on Google — and they're the same things that will make them win in LLM ecosystems.

When AEO eventually stabilizes, brands with strong fundamentals will naturally be the ones LLMs understand the best.

Final Thoughts: Stay Curious, But Stay Rational

AEO is an exciting emerging concept, and it will become meaningful someday — when:

LLMs expose ranking signals
retrieval systems standardize
vendors mature
and the economics stabilize

But that day is not today.

Right now, AEO is a speculative category built on guesswork, not verified insight.

Meanwhile, Shopify brands already have real, practical ways to feed their product data into LLM ecosystems today — without spending money on AEO platforms.

The winning approach?

Stay flexible, keep your product data clean, leverage official integration channels, and invest in durable, high-ROI fundamentals… not premature optimization.

AEO Isn’t Ready for Prime Time — But Shopify Stores Can Still Get Their Products Into ChatGPT and Other LLMs Right Now