001 / answer engine optimization for ecommerce

The shelf moved into the chat.

Answer Engine Optimization for ecommerce brands. We get your products cited inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude — before your category auctions out.

chat · skincareLIVE
top picks · cited from 6 sources
MERIDIAN
Velvet Matte Base 03N
$32
NORTH/AVE
Soft Focus Foundation Warm 4
$38
your sku

the teardown shows you exactly this — for your brand, in your category

LIVEChatGPT processed 2.7M shopping-intent queries in the last hour
002 / what changed

Seven sessions, then one conversation.

In eighteen months, the buying journey for your category lost five steps. Most brands haven't noticed because their dashboards were never instrumented for the channel that absorbed them.

2023 — the legacy funnel
Ad
Click
Browse
Retarget
Email
Cart
Checkout
2026 — the agentic funnel
Ask AI
Buy
source: adobe analytics 2025 · opascope agentic commerce report 2026
003 / the cost of invisibility
$3.20M
annual revenue leaked, your scenario

An $8M DTC brand. $70 average order, $280 lifetime value. 10% of category queries shift to AI assistants this year — the conservative number, not the aggressive one. If you appear in zero of those answers, those orders walk to your competitors. Compare it to your annual Meta spend. Run yours below.

$8M
$70
$280
10%
sources: bain & company 2026 · swell dtc benchmarks 2026 · seer interactive 2025
004 / definition

AEO is how your products get recommended
when no human ever sees a search results page.

SEO does this
  • Optimizes a list of links
  • Rewards backlinks and authority
  • Surfaces in a SERP
  • Buyer scans, clicks, evaluates
  • Traffic source: Google
  • Keep doing it.
AEO does this
  • Optimizes the answer
  • Rewards structured product data and citations
  • Surfaces in a chat
  • Buyer asks, decides in seconds
  • Traffic source: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude
  • Start doing this.
005 / the system

Four stages. One architecture.

01
02
03
04
01 / audit

We run 200 prompts before we run our mouth.

We map the actual AI shelf in your category. Two hundred real shopping prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude, against your top SKUs and your three nearest competitors. You get the citation matrix whether or not you sign with us.

02 / instrument

If you can't see the channel, you can't argue for the budget.

We deploy AI-traffic tracking, server-side attribution, and an AEO dashboard your CFO will accept. By week three, you can answer the question "what did AI search drive last week?" with a number, not a hand wave.

03 / optimize

Six things ship in the first sixty days. None of them are blog posts.

Product feed rebuild for AI shopping agents. Agentic Commerce Protocol enablement for ChatGPT Instant Checkout. Universal Commerce Protocol for Google AI Mode and Gemini. Perplexity Merchant Program registration. Citation seeding on the third-party platforms AI models actually pull from. Crawler permissions audit.

04 / compound

Share-of-voice is the only metric that matters now.

Monthly content, citation work, and benchmark reporting. Your competitor catches up in eighteen months; in those eighteen months, you compound. Most engagements show measurable AI-attributed revenue inside ninety days and meaningful share shift inside six months.

006 / proof

Inside ninety days, a $12M skincare brand went from 0/200 to 78/200.

client name redacted on public site · skincare · october 2025 → january 2026

They had a CAC problem. Meta returns flat for two quarters, branded search holding but starting to dip, no AI plan. The CMO had read three "AI search" newsletters and pinned them to a Notion doc no one opened. We ran the audit on a Tuesday. The phone rang Friday.

0 → 78
citations in 200-prompt audit
+22%
AOV from AI-referred orders vs. paid social
"We had no idea this was a channel until we saw the citation matrix. Eight weeks later it was our second-best acquisition source."
— CMO, [client redacted]
fig 5.1 / share of AI citations · 12-week rolling
[client]competitor acompetitor bcompetitor c

We don't take every brand. We take the ones who treat the next eighteen months as the only window they have.

007 / next step

Free five-minute video. Your shelf, in three chat windows.

We run your store through ChatGPT-5, Perplexity, and Gemini for the queries your category actually gets. We record what the models see, what they cite, and where your product schema breaks. The video lands in your inbox within one business day. No call required, no pitch attached.

no pitch. no call. one business day.
Want the full picture? The 200-prompt Citation Audit is $1,500, delivered in 48 hours. See what's inside
we record ~12 teardowns/week. priority goes to brands above $5M in dtc revenue.