The way shoppers find, search for, and buy products has evolved. The journey is no longer a quick Google search that lands them straight on your site. Shoppers ask LLMs, scroll TikTok, watch YouTube hauls, or read the results surfaced in AI Overviews without ever leaving Google.
What does that mean for you and your Shopify store? You have to be visible in more places, across more points in the customer journey. Reviews can help you do that.
To dig into how, and get the most tactical, actionable strategies for making your Shopify store visible wherever customers are looking, we brought together a panel of three SEO specialists from across ecommerce and household-name brands.
Edward 'Teddie' Cowell is Global VP of SEO and GSO at WPP Media, with 28 years in search. Kyle Risley is Senior SEO Lead at Shopify, with 13 years in the field. Sam Gipson is an SEO and ecommerce consultant who spent six years heading up SEO at Dunelm, one of the UK's largest home retailers.
You can watch the full session above, or read on for the recap. For the step-by-step version, our guide to improving SEO on Shopify is the practical companion to this piece.
The current landscape: GEO vs SEO
Before we get to specific strategies, let's cover the basics: how different is GEO (Generative Search Optimization) from traditional SEO, and are the fundamentals still the same?
Is GEO a new discipline, or SEO with a shiny new AI wrapper?
Teddie's answer: most of the fundamentals hold. LLMs work differently from search engines but they still lean heavily on search results for grounding and verification. The baseline hasn't moved: useful content, crawlability, structured data, product feeds, authority, brand trust, reviews, and a good user experience. He noted that the brands with a solid, consistent SEO strategy are already dominating their categories in AI results. It's why WPP Media talks about GSO, generative and search optimization, rather than treating the two as separate.
What is new is agentic commerce: AI agents that can compare products and buy without the shopper ever visiting your site, through emerging standards like the Universal Commerce Protocol. UCP is an open Google-led standard, co-built with Shopify among others, that lets agents transact across stores. That shift makes your product data, feed accuracy, and trust signals a commercial priority, not just a technical one.
What actually changed in the last year?
Sam noted that adoption isn’t purely organic. AI is being advertised heavily and built into the tools people already use, driving uptake whether they went looking for it or not. Three points stood out:
1. Adoption is being actively promoted, not just happening.
AI tool use is climbing fast, an Ofcom study published in April this year found 54% of UK adults were using them, but Sam's point was that this isn't purely organic [1]. The tools are being advertised heavily and embedded directly into the places people already work. His live example was the "Ask Gemini" button now built into Chrome: AI arriving in your browser whether you sought it out or not. Adoption is being pushed into everyday workflows, which means it will keep climbing.
2. Research is becoming conversational.
The reason shoppers are adopting these tools for discovery, not just quick answers, is that LLMs take the heavy lifting out of what used to be a manual research process. Instead of opening ten tabs and comparing them yourself, you ask a question and get a synthesized answer. That changes the kind of language shoppers use, and the kind of content that gets surfaced.
3. The job is to answer the questions people actually ask.
For merchants, that means working out the real questions customers are asking about your brand and products, then answering them consistently, not just on your own pages, but across the third-party sites and platforms where your brand appears. Consistency across all of those is what builds the authority these systems draw on.
Is traffic shifting away from organic search for Shopify?
Zero-click search and AI Overviews have made many merchants nervous about losing traffic. However, Shopify's data tells a more encouraging story, at least for ecommerce.
Shopify's Senior SEO Lead, Kyle Risley, shared the numbers from Shopify's merchant base. In Q2, Shopify merchants saw 12% year-over-year growth in traditional organic search. AI referral traffic grew nearly 200% year over year, and it converted roughly 80% higher than standard SEO traffic, even controlling for visits landing directly on product pages.
Teddie added one caveat: this is an ecommerce story. Publishers and informational sites have seen sharp traffic drops as LLMs answer questions directly. Transactional ecommerce is the category seeing the growth.
The challenge for lean merchant teams
Most Shopify merchants don't have an in-house SEO team. Usually it's a founder, or a single marketing hire, wearing several hats at once. So the real question isn't what you could do across search and AI, it's what's worth doing first with limited time.
Asked what an ecommerce store should take from all this change, Sam's answer was to get obsessive about two things: your product data, and your customers' own words.
Start with your product data
When asked what matters most, the panel kept returning to one thing: your product data.
Product data wins. Make sure it's complete, consistent and aligned across your product pages, Google Merchant Center and the Shopify Catalog, which gives AI agents a consistent way to understand your products. And log into Google Merchant Center! If there's missing data Google is asking for, addressing it can directly impact your visibility in shopping results. - Kyle Risley, Shopify
Consistency matters because AI agents and channels want one reliable source of truth. When your pages, feed, and the Catalog disagree, you force them to guess which is right. Logging into Merchant Center is the most-skipped step, and the easiest win: Google flags exactly what's missing, and most stores have gaps sitting there unfilled. And if you collect reviews with a partner app like Judge.me, that adds a further layer of credibility to your listings across every channel.
Mine your customers' own language
The second theme was customer language: use the words your customers use to describe your products.
Customer obsession is a key part of any SEO strategy. The words customers use to describe your product, "portable", "lightweight", "easy to clean", are often the exact terms shoppers search for. If they're not in your product description, you're leaving visibility on the table. Google Search Console and People Also Ask are free tools that can show you exactly where the gaps are. - Sam Gipson, Ex-Dunelm.
Sam's own example came from Dunelm: customers kept describing a product with words that weren't in its official description, the exact words the next shopper would search. Those words were sitting in the reviews the whole time.
You can start finding those gaps today, with free tools. Google Search Console shows the long-tail queries you already appear for. Google's "People Also Ask" boxes, and tools like AlsoAsked, surface the questions shoppers ask around your brand and products, worth answering directly on your pages. Your reviews are the richest source of all. They give you real customer language, objections, use cases, and comparisons, written for you.
Your reviews are a discovery asset, not just social proof
On reviews and UGC, the panel's point was consistent: these are no longer just conversion tools, they're how you get discovered.
Teddie framed it plainly: reviews are discovery assets now, not just conversion widgets. AI answer engines are hunting for exactly what reviews contain: real customer language, objections, sizing details, comparisons. That's what they draw on to compare and recommend one product over another, but only if they can read them. Reviews buried behind uncrawlable JavaScript, or badly marked up, might as well not exist to an AI system.
Kyle made the same point from Shopify's side, and was blunt that plenty of stores still haven't done it: he regularly sees stores that don't display reviews at all. At a minimum, collect them, display them, and mark them up with structured data. The next step is summarizing them and making them searchable, so shoppers, and the systems reading on their behalf, get to the insight faster. One technical note he added: some AI crawlers don't execute JavaScript, so review content and its schema need to render server-side to be seen.
This is where Judge.me's work is aimed. Making your reviews readable by AI shopping assistants is a toggle in the dashboard; once it's on, your review content and structured data are server-rendered so assistants can read them. Our AI sentiment and topic analysis pulls out the themes and phrases customers keep using, the "lightweight and portable" language Sam described. You can feed those straight back into your product copy. And because Judge.me is one of the review partners feeding the Shopify Catalog, the reviews you collect are seen there too.
What not to do
The panel was unanimous on the biggest risk: chasing AI hacks.
Avoid trend-chasing. Spinning out thousands of low-quality pages might feel like momentum but it's a long-term failure strategy. Be wary of anyone promising overnight visibility gains. Generative and Search Optimisation (GSO) is about building for customers first, alongside the machines. - Edward 'Teddie' Cowell, WPP Media
Teddie's fuller point was that the last two years have brought a wave of people into SEO and GEO selling reinvented versions of tactics the industry abandoned 15 to 20 years ago, mass-produced spammy content chief among them. He pointed to research from Otterly that followed some of these recommended tactics: brands saw a short-term spike in ChatGPT, then got crushed in Google's core updates. Sam echoed it: be skeptical of LinkedIn gimmicks claiming you must chop up your content a special way or run a script to "win" AI. The foundational, user-focused work is usually what's getting you into AI results in the first place.
Cutting through the noise
To close, each speaker named one thing to stop doing and one to start.
Stop chasing shortcuts: mass-generated pages, fake reviews, synthetic Q&As, and anyone promising overnight visibility. They might move a number briefly, but they don't last.
Start with the unglamorous foundations: get your product data complete and consistent, mine your reviews for the language customers actually use, and answer the real questions shoppers ask on the pages where they'll look. Build for customers first, machines second, and treat visibility as a long game.
This holds whatever your store size. A small brand with no big budget can still compete, but not through shortcuts. Teddie's route was to build brand preference over time: an active social presence, targeted digital PR, and getting your name onto the third-party sites, blogs, and review platforms that LLMs draw from when they make category recommendations.
Most importantly, make sure you don't treat SEO in isolation, for a one-person team, the same customer language that improves your product pages can feed your social, your email, and your ads.
How Judge.me helps you get found
Reviews form a key part of almost every tactic the panel shared, and that's where Judge.me is built to help.
Make your reviews readable by AI. This is the toggle Kyle and Teddie's point calls for: once enabled, Judge.me server-renders your review content and structured data so AI shopping assistants can read and cite them. We can't promise placement, no one can, but we can make sure your reviews are there to be read when an assistant looks.
Mine customer language automatically. AI sentiment and topic analysis surfaces the themes and exact phrases customers use, so the "portable, lightweight, easy to clean" words Sam described end up in your copy, not lost in a thousand unread reviews.
Earn star ratings in search. Judge.me adds review schema to your product pages, so your ratings become eligible to appear in Google results and stand out in a crowded list.
Answer the questions shoppers ask. Product and store FAQs, drawn from your own reviews, put the answers AI assistants look for directly on the page.
Count in the Shopify Catalog. As one of Shopify's review partners, the reviews you collect with Judge.me feed the Shopify Catalog that AI agents and channels read.
This piece is the foundation of a wider series on making your reviews visible across search and AI. For the practical, step-by-step version, start with our guide to improving SEO on Shopify, and see how the review features above work on our AI review features page.
Frequently asked questions
Is AI search killing organic traffic for ecommerce?
Not according to Shopify's data. Kyle Risley shared that Shopify merchants saw 12% year-over-year growth in organic search, with AI referral traffic up nearly 200% and converting around 80% higher than standard SEO traffic. For ecommerce, AI search is proving additive. Publishers and informational sites are a different story.
Do my reviews help me show up in AI search?
They can, if AI systems can read them. AI answer engines draw on the authentic customer language in reviews, objections, use cases, comparisons, to compare and recommend products. Reviews need to render server-side with proper structured data, rather than being buried behind JavaScript, for crawlers to access them.
What's the single most important thing to fix first?
The panel's consensus was product data: complete, consistent, and aligned across your product pages, Google Merchant Center, and the Shopify Catalog. Logging into Google Merchant Center to fix the data Google flags as missing is a quick, free, high-impact first move.
How can a small brand compete with bigger players in AI search?
By building brand preference over time, an active social presence, digital PR, and getting referenced on third-party sites and review platforms that LLMs draw from. There's no shortcut; the panel was unanimous that AI hacks backfire.
Should I add FAQ sections to my product pages?
Yes. If a reasonable buyer would want to know something before they purchase, put it on the page. There's no downside, and it gives both shoppers and AI systems another clear answer to read.
Are product descriptions or meta descriptions more important?
Detailed product descriptions matter most, they inform shoppers and feed your Merchant Center data. Meta descriptions are no longer a direct ranking factor, but they're still your storefront window in search results, the copy that earns the click, so they're worth writing well even if AI drafts them.
Where should I publish content for AI search, blogs or product pages?
Let the data decide. Test your core category prompts in ChatGPT and Gemini and see which of your pages they cite as sources. Those are the page types worth prioritizing, and it differs by store, so there's no single rule.
Sources
[1] Passive social media use, AI companionship, and online side hustles: UK adults’ media and online lives revealed (Ofcom, 2026)
