# The Complete GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) Guide for E-Commerce in 2026 (Get Ranked #1 by AI)

Channel: James Demetriades ECom
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjrkAz2MKPA
Duration: 31 min
Language: English
Words: 4589
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/LjrkAz2MKPA

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[0:00] We will be discussing today getting your brand recognized by large language models and appearing as a search result. You know when someone asks a specific question about a specific problem or product. We have Tristan who is a specialist and who does this for a living who will go through that with you guys. This here is what I believe and what we believe in the commerce club to be the fundamental strategic differentiator in 2026. I can tell you for absolute certain this is an uncommon process in most e-commerce mentorship groups. This is quite a new thing and it is we were going to dive deep into it. But the

[0:41] theme of what I'm going to be talking about is how the buying journey for your customers when you're building e-commerce stores is fundamentally changing in the era of AI. Everyone knows, hands up. Who uses chat GBT and couldn't live without it now? Or and who prefers Claude instead of Chat GBT? Interesting. And if you don't know what any of those are, those are large language models and they are AI models trained on huge amounts of data sets that from the internet primarily up to a certain date and obviously they assist everyone and everything. So, I'm going to dive straight in and uh we're going to crack

[1:25] on with the presentation. But before I do, just so you know that who's preaching to you today is an actual credible person. So, my name is Tristan Vandenberg. I've known James for about the last couple years, but my background is in PR and pitching to journalists and media and marketing and strategic marketing. So, I've worked with startups, scaleups, and Fortune 500 companies. I've been working for two years specifically on AI visibility within large language models and getting brands and people featured in these searches. And on the side of that, James and the team at Commerce Club have helped me scale my first e-commerce store to $350,000

[2:14] uh dollars in its first year. And this is this was on the side to what I'm doing here with my agency. So, we'll jump straight in. Setting the scene. Super important that you all recognize that the buying cycle is completely changing for customers. In four, five, six years ago, it was very common that you'd either get served a Facebook ad, you'd get faced a Tik Tok ad, Google ad, whatever it may be. and or the alternative was if you wanted to buy something, you search on Google and you troll through blue links. That is not how it's happening anymore. Yes, Google still has a huge place m and that's not

[2:56] to be underestimated, but 50% of buyers now begin their product research inside a chatbot rather than a search engine. And by chatbot, I mean chat GBT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grock, whatever you can think of, it's starting here. And that's fundamentally where we're going. On top of that, we'll see here the queries in in the olden days. What is the This is something I sell. I sell baby louners, one of my products. An old previous query would be what is the best baby lounger? Now we're seeing because

[3:28] we're getting such detailed responses. We're getting a far more detailed prompt. Which baby lounger is the safest for a newborn, machine washable, and under£60? This means that the specificity in your content has to be matching what your customers are asking for. It's super important that you're recognizing what is your brand, what is the sector you operate in, and are you answering the fundamental questions your customers are asking? It is so important. And you can find that by either using a large language model. What are the top 50 questions for someone that's buying an electronic product? And you can create content to answer those questions. What is Shopify doing about this? People are

[4:19] searching on AI. What how is Shopify, the largest e-commerce platform in the world, catering to the buying journey within AI? Well, it's a good question. And if the pe the more prudent of us in the room would have recognized on the sidebar of your Shopify store now there will be an agentic storefront that you will see and it displays something like this. Now, this was for one of my stores, and this is not optimized at all, this store, but I'm still receiving £379 in the last uh the last 30 days, and I haven't optimized at all for this, but that is a directional statistic showing you where the buyers are going now. We

[5:04] are fundamentally seeing people searching for your products that you're selling in these models and we're securing sales. We're securing sessions. We're securing people viewing our store through these platforms. Here's some statistics I've got for you. Eight times growth in traffic from AI services, AI platforms. 15 times growth in orders from AI platforms. This is setting the scene and Shopify is allowing you to track your orders. How many orders Shopify have I got from AI platforms this week? You can filter. You can find out what type of content caused that specific buyer to show up in that large language model. you can find this here is a billiondoll software that

[5:55] shopify are using and they are absolutely not being utilized to the best of our ability is incumbent on us as e-commerce entrepreneurs whether you're earning 160,000 USD a month or earning nothing and you're just starting you need to assess and audit where your brand is as a as a start point so important and Shopify Y does this for you. It can you can be you're able to see how well your brand is showing up in these searches. So take

[6:27] a look. So who's heard of SEO here? About half. So in general, I'm going to be general in the room. SEO is how I can get my company, my website featured on as close to the first page of Google as possible. And there's loads of ways to do this. You can optimize your meta tags, you can do blogs, you can get back links, you can edit your your URL so it's favorable, you can have a favorable

[7:06] domain. The bottom two are brand new. And I say brand new because they only have been around and seriously and materially been paid attention to in the last two to three years. So this is in its infancy. Although that is scary, it also presents a huge opportunity for all of us in this room because I can categorically tell you your competitors your the people that you're thinking that are your competitors now whether you've started or you are currently trading the they're not strategizing and they're not considering this in the marketing playbook. So important. So what are they? Let's set the ground rules. As I said, SEO is the purpose of getting your

[7:47] website as close to the first page of Google as possible. AEO. Who's searched something on Google recently and has received a Gemini AI overview? Quite a few of you. And I imagine if any of you have done that. AEO is the process of a the Gemini and the platform from Google curing the your prompt that you've put into Google the search engine and giving you a answer

[8:19] that solves a specific direct question. So it will it's it's slightly different to this and there is some crossover across all of them but is the process of curating your prompt and giving you the best answer possible. So this is what AO is now GEO and one of the this is the main and fundamental piece of this whole presentation is the new piece. This is

[8:46] being cited in large language models. How can I get my brand being generated in the answer from chatgbt claude grock perplexity and that we'll dive deep into how we can do that today but those are the ground rules and I hope the clear differences are relatively clear because there is a a shedload of crossover but all you need to basically know is that earns your position on Google. This is being the source that resolves a direct question and this is being named in a a generative AI model at the

[9:24] bottom. So I feel that this is the most valuable slide that I will do and I will send this deck to you afterwards. No one is thinking about this specifically but it's logical. If your e-commerce website is stopping AI crawlers being able to reach and read your website, you're not going to get excited. You're going to lose a shitload of sales and it's going to be completely negative. So, what can you do in your website backend or what can you recommend to your developer or can you hire someone on Fiverr to help make sure your website is optimized for crawability when it comes for AI? So

[10:11] robots text and crawler access. So this the this here block crawlers that make the page invisible to AI. The top one there content behind JavaScript content behind the code. I cannot tell you how many of my clients have come to me with this specific issue. Behind the coding of the website, they have they've had code that loads so late that the AI cannot read it. It's a big issue. Claims trapped in imagery. This is a common one as well. People upload things to their website. Your website is, let's say you're just starting an e-commerce

[10:49] store. You've got some product imagery. You're loading on and it says WhatsApp 00123. WhatsApp 0. Those are the labels. That is the claim for your image. So, quick tip for you. If you're going to upload a image onto your website, name the product of it. You can do that in the back end of Mac or if you're on Windows just say for my for my example baby lounger photo one baby lounger photo two just so the AI model knows what that photo is super important and then we've got schema and semantic URLs making sure and this is the danger with a lot of people that use AI platforms to

[11:31] build websites is that if you rip a an example website of of a competitor and you want take that website for example, it will also take their URL and that will not be optimal for being searched on your um on AI. So super important that your schema which is again another source of code and semantic URLs are all optimized for your product pages. Really really important. And what I've just put at the bottom here is machine or AI model readable is the entry ticket and authority beyond your own site is the

[12:08] differentiator. Really, really important stuff. But again, super technical and if any of you guys got any questions, I'll happily spend time with you after. No problem at all. So this again is what are these what are these models citing? So when we are getting featured in PR and just to also set the ground rules because I haven't really been perhaps clear with what PR is but PR is an old traditional uh sector and it's it used to be the process of getting your brand image or story in newspapers. That was where PR came from. And it was the process of a PR professional like myself talking to a

[12:53] journalist, selling a story, and getting brand awareness through storytelling. That's what I am. I'm basically a storyteller. And I tell James' story and many other companies stories. Now, the benefit of this is PR is now sexy again because of AI. So 48% of what AI will rank for and will improve your rankings is news media. I can categorically tell you people starting e-commerce brands are not considering news media as a proper channel to go after. And I'm telling you, the ones that do will absolutely see a a substantial uptake in AI sightings if they start to prioritize this action. Next, blogs, forums, and niche sites. Who uses Reddit here? Does

[13:46] anyone use Reddit? Reddit is and if you would have noticed on lots of AI platforms, Reddit, Quora, Facebook have just launched forums. Facebook forums to try and combat the traffic on Reddit. The reason for this is because AI wants to site genuine real human authority. And I tell you right now, if any of you spent any material time on Reddit, it is a wild west out there. But you cannot tell me it's not genuine authentic human conversation. So there's no wonder why that why that's

[14:22] getting cited. The key thing here within this as well is that it's owned. You should have a Reddit strategy. What James and I actually had this strategy. We had this conversation recently. How can we grow James's profile on Reddit? People are talking about James. Is he a scammer? Is he going to take my money? Is is it going to work? It's we know it's real but these are real humans that has got a genuine buying query before they go and purchase. So how are we going to to contribute to the conversation? The answer is genuine authentic real profiles meeting the discussion where it's at. So I've just for full

[15:10] transparency I've recommended James that we create an account and we join the conversation and be real. We're not trying to arbitrage the conversation for more sales and whatever it is. We're genuinely dispelling myths within the community by giving them real access and answers from the man himself. You can do that exact same formula for your brands. For example, if it's a product you're selling that's got a bit of negative connotations, why don't you create a Reddit account and dispel those? Have you looked at this article? Have you looked at this product instead? Have you are you using it correctly? Own the conversation. And another great way to

[15:50] do that is blogs. But I would also recommend you engage in blogs once you've established your brand and you are you are sure on on that front. And the last thing is social. Really really interesting. When it comes to social media, almost very rarely will Instagram or Facebook get cited within these platforms. But places like LinkedIn, places like Reddit, Quora are all getting cited. Um, and then lastly, I'll just put a little stat here. Mukra, which is the largest journalist analyst platform, analyzed over a million cited links this year in AI. Most were non-paid coverage and journalism has held a fifth to a third of all citations

[16:36] throughout. That is huge and it cannot be underestimated. If you're thinking about growing a brand, it doesn't even have to be in e-commerce, in the service niche, whatever it may be, you've got to prioritize this way of working. Again, almost half of the citations come from untraditional channels. Trade press. What do I mean by trade press? I mean, if I'm in the beauty niche, I want to be featured on beauty beauty magazine.com. If I'm in the if I'm selling a luxury product like Zaros here, where better to be featured than GQ magazine? So, what me and James aiming for? We want to see this on GQ. We want

[17:28] to see this in the likes of Men's Health, whatever it may be. You get the picture. Those are the huge platforms that make the strategic difference when you're marketing your brand. If you can get cited in a low level where it hasn't get hasn't got many monthly readers and slowly build up to the nationals by building credibility over time, that will not only do you wonders for brand awareness in general, but it'll also do you wonders for getting cited in the AI

[17:57] models. Number two, forums and communities. so important that we are prioritizing Reddit and we're prioritizing platforms where your customers are talking about the your industry your niche and then lastly review and comparison sites trust pilot independent verdicts that models treat as evidence the theme as you haven't maybe you have haven't grasped yet is getting third party credibility is the way to get featured in AI but also give you the most credible brand awareness. And James touched on content repeatability and reusing content, not reinventing the content wheel. How amazing would be to share your reviews, share your trade press, share your

[18:47] national stories that you've secured. Share the positive conversations on Reddit or other talkative platforms. It is a gold mine for those that can be bothered to pursue it. 45% of citations are drawn from sources that sit outside the typical marketing budget. What is the typical marketing budget? Good question. The typical marketing budget is meta ads, Google ads, Tik Tok ads. Can we think outside the box? Can we do something different? Can we be better than our

[19:23] competitors? Consider this. Let's think about how how would you structure getting cited? We know that we need to be featured in trade press. We know we need to be doing earned media and and and owned media on your social platforms across your blogs. How could you structure it optimally to be featured? include statistics times two press releases that get cited carry about twice the data points to those that do not. So why don't you com you go and use AI to do some market research do a market research report create some content that is undeniable from your customers and link them to that structure in ring wins I am a big

[20:14] believer in clear concise and relevant I cannot stand and I'm sure you all can imagine this and sympathize to this as well people are invigorated by the amount of AI slop Now people chuck something into chatbt, come it straight out and they just place it on their platforms. Why? I do not know it. They haven't checked it. They haven't they haven't used a proper process. If you are looking for a process, I use the AI club

[20:45] sandwich model. It sounds a bit odd. The top of the bread is your human input. The middle of the sandwich is the is the AI output. The bottom of the bread is human input again. And never should it just be input, output, out. Never. People are now starting to begin to recognize when people are using AI. And buyers are getting really turned off if they notice that you're having no lack of care. Pinging something into chat. GBT comes straight out, put it

[21:16] into a caption. People know it. Taking the time to be develop your content, care about your content is so important. Speed wins, recency. If you've uploaded a blog and you're recognizing where that traffic is coming to your website is from that specific blog, what you can do is simply update the date. Say you two weeks ago you up you posted a blog and it's generating you 800 website sessions organically from Google. What you can do is if you want to continue that momentum, add a little date line at the beginning to the most recent date to yesterday because the AI models will continue to site recent content. So one quick and easy

[22:03] win is just updating the date. And last of all, wires are opening up. A wire is a press release service where you pay €750 euros, let's say, and a media company like prnewire or newswire.com will blast your news, whatever that news is, to as many websites as possible and you will get backlink after backlink

[22:29] after backlink. F these are five times now more likely to be cited from AI if you consider doing that process. super interesting. All I recommend you guys note down newswire.com or presswire.com and if you've got any stories that you'd want to distribute to the wider media, help your AI visibility, you would go on

[22:53] there. So, as I've touched on, I won't go on too much on this slide because I feel like I've made my point and James has as well. actually earned reach, conversational reach, owned reach, this PR, this Reddit, this blogs. So important that you are optimizing for each things. Third party coverage and commentary that models treat as evidence, credible places. Do you think that you getting a push putting a social post out there is going to be is you

[23:37] being featured in the Financial Times? No way. It's Financial Times has been around for 70 years. Credible platform, millions of readers. I would pro I put my eggs in this basket. Conversational reach. We spoke about this before. Can we join the conversation where our customers can we meet our customers where they're talking? Can we create a blog strategy? Can we create owned media, structured pages, FAQs, data, schema, code optimized for

[24:12] this super important. So, this is funny because I've trademarked this in the UK, which means I've gone and paid for this because I believe, and I'm going all in on this, that this is going to be the fundamental process of how people will use and take their journey to getting featured in AI. I've called it pace, and it's a four-step plan. I like things

[24:42] that are clear, concise, and relevant. As I've said, if you want to get your brand increased visibility on AI platforms, I'd recommend you follow this framework because it's worked for every single one of my clients, including James. P for presence. Show up in the sources models actually need. We've covered what their sources are. PR, communities, reviews, authority, be corroborated by sources that are not you. This is a big wordy word, but basically what it means is have lots of third credible third parties citing you

[25:21] that talking about you. Clarity. Don't waffle. I don't want to see loads of huge massive long lists of text on your website. I'm a buyer. I'm I'm buying something for someone. I don't want to read a novel. Clear, concise, relevant content. And in terms of written content is what I'm talking about here. Endurance. Keep it going.

[25:47] This is a circular circular framework. Can we keep getting coverage? Can we keep putting blogs out there? Can we keep being part of the conversation? And it will just continually, as James put earlier, become a flywheel. And if anyone have seen a flywheel in real life, it starts really slow at the beginning. Once it gets the momentum, it goes on its own. It's exactly the same with this. This is essentially that pace framework what I did on the previous slide. This is how you'd implement implement it. So when it comes to the AI visibility journey, where do you start audit? Where are you now? Are you

[26:23] showing up? How bad are you? It really is the question. How far down are you? And the only way to do that is to go to platforms like Peak AI. Peec.ai or L. Another good one that I use is LLM Refs. refs.com and what it allows you to do is stick your URL into that platform and see where you rank for your key search terms in each single living AI model on the planet. So you can assess where you are first then we can start to build start looking at quotable assets the model can lift cleanly like PR etc. Can we amplify that through more coverage, communities, and

[27:11] independent voices? For example, you know, the creator method. Just because you hire an influencer doesn't mean they're just for videos. Can you get them to do something written? They've got a big platform. I'm sure they can share it on there. Can we refine? Can we track the citations, retire what's already gone stale, and publish again? Again, the reason why I'm buying into

[27:33] this process is because it's repeatable. And I've put all my seven plus years of best practice of PR, journalism, marketing in general into this. And I can, as far as I can tell, this is an indestructible way of how to clearly and concisely get your brand featured in AI search. Almost finished, guys. Thank you for

[28:01] hanging in. I appreciate it. Three things starting next week. Find out where you are. Where where's your brand sitting? Ask ask chatgbt. Ask Claude where is my brand sitting? Run your category questions through major AI models and write down get what gets named. Who is because you might find competitors you've never heard of before.

[28:27] You know that I'm in the baby niche. What other baby brands are selling baby loungers that I might not not know of? And what type of questions? What are the top 20 questions a mother would ask before purchasing a baby lounger? And then optimizing content for that. Can we create some PR? Can we create some blogs? Can we create a community

[28:48] conversation on Reddit? Make one page. Here's a challenge for you guys. Make at least one or your page or your whole website machine readable. And by machine, I mean AI model readable. Number three, earn one piece of third-party proof. Get someone on Reddit talking about your brand or your company. Try and get some PR earned media by either going through me or going through another PR professional that you you you've researched. go through Tristan or

[29:24] go yourself. These pe these magazines, these editors, I've got their email addresses. Send them an email. Hey, I've got a story. It can be founderled. It can be I've got I've got it can be missionled. It can be whatever it is. Would you like to cover this story? And if it does, the worst they can say is no. Get the out of my inbox. Or they can say, "Yes, excellent story. Let's have a conversation." Or, "You write something and send it to me. I'll place it on

[29:56] there. Send us your headshot." Great. Let's see if we can do it. With no recent coverage, the models have nothing authoritative for reach for. Authority, authority, authority. And the biggest company in the world, Alphabet, who owns Google, runs the eat philosophy. education, authoritative, authoritiveness, and trust. Super super important that we also embed that same philosophy when it comes to

[30:28] this. Now, here's the kind of exciting part. Thank you very much. But I'm very very proud to have known James for a couple couple years and he has helped me beyond not just as a friend as a brother and as someone who I can genuinely say end to end cares about your journey as an e-commerce entrepreneur right from the beginning right until when you're earning millions and millions and millions and we've as as he as he quite rightly said we've now switched with roles he was I was paying my mentorship

[31:05] fees for him and he helped me greatly. Now he pays me for PR and I'm very proud that my brand and my PR agency Parable PR is now collaborating with the Commerce Club. So if you guys wanted direct access to me, we can do that through the commerce

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