The GenAI Holiday Blitz Is Coming—Is Your Site Ready?

By Robyn White and Annie Deihl

This post was originally published on Women x AI

As the calendar turns to the second half of the year, if you're in retail, you're already strategizing about how to make the numbers this holiday, especially with all the headwinds this year. Tariffs. Inflation. Supply chain snafus. Cyber Monday in December. Annnnd then there's AI.

You've probably introduced some AI tools to your site. Chatbots, marketing automation, and pricing optimization are incredible steps in the pursuit of growth. Though we've noticed AI can have a sneaky way of adding work rather than reducing it.

While you've been busy optimizing for margins, your customer has changed how they shop online. Turns out, SEO and paid search are not dead (Alphabet Q2 Earnings), but they're no longer the only game in town.

Instead of traditional search, customers have increased their use of GenAI assistants like ChatGPT, GoogleAI, Perplexity, Claude, and others to find the perfect gifts for everyone on their list. From general research and product recommendations to price comparisons and deal hunting, this shift is part of a broader trend outlined in a recent survey from Adobe for Business. Adobe's survey also shows this trend is growing quickly with no signs of slowing down as AI platforms launch newer, faster, and more robust experiences.

Prepping your site and brand to take advantage of these new shopping behaviors could give you an edge, and the good news is, you're not too late to make updates.

Get GenAI Holiday Shopper Ready in Three Steps:

The first step is something NOT to do: Don't drown in the tsunami of information. The sheer volume of news articles, podcasts, and yes, blogs, addressing this topic is dizzying.

Remind yourself that SEO isn't obsolete, so keep up with all your best SEO practices:

• Comprehensive, well-written product detail page information, including refreshed descriptive language that conveys new info and addresses the shoppers' needs.

• Authoritative content that positions your products as the industry leader, for example, surveys, "state of the industry reports," and white papers.

• On-point social media, including vlogs and video posts, like YouTube tutorials, TikTok Shorts with behind-the-scenes glimpses from your brand, and LinkedIn video posts.

• Clear brand representation when your products meet your potential customers' needs. For instance, go beyond product details and include benefit-oriented messaging.

And guess what, everything you do for SEO, you're doing for AI. This is one of the sources LLMs use to compile summaries and link your site.

Second, establish a benchmark for AI discovery, traffic, and referrals. You want metrics to help inform where to invest, build, and grow next year.

One way to establish this foundation is to capture how your brand appears within AI summaries and overviews. To get started, create personas of your shoppers and have them "shop" the AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, for your products to see what comes up.

Some prompt examples:

• "I need recommendations for [product category] that [specific requirements]."

• "What is/are the best [product/s]?"

• "I'm comparing [competitor products]. Which would work better for [use case]?"

• "Where should I shop for [product] online? I care most about [personal priorities]."

Then, take note. Is your brand there? If not, why not?

Dig into the brands being shown and review where the AI model is pulling data from. Yes, you can ask the AI to identify its resources, though some platforms are better at sharing sources than others.

Third, lean into AI now to help with your contingency planning. Ask your enterprise-level AI model to offer solutions for the challenges you can imagine, and to suggest some you haven't thought of yet.

You can even pressure check the plans you have in place. Using an AI model to brainstorm and think through possible scenarios is a great way to prep for the unknown.

What's Coming Next?

Agentic AI is in the ether. Over the next one to two years, autonomous AI agents will work on your behalf to shop for you, including finding personalized products, enabling virtual try-on, and even negotiating prices for you!

The shift away from traditional online shopping habits could ultimately mean that product discovery on your site will need to be optimized for both AI agents and humans.

One other important takeaway is to think deeply about who owns this in your organization because strategy and accountability will be key to implementation.

The adage "the only constant is change" has never been more relevant. What's new this year is the speed at which things are changing.

To stay sane, remember, yes, there's a lot to learn, but successful retailers follow their customers. Keep them at the center of all you do, and you'll find the path that works for your brands.

Sources and Further Reading:

• Adobe for Business Research on the Explosive Rise of Generative AI Referral Traffic

• Alphabet Beats Earnings Expectations - Showing Search (including Paid Search) is still growing

• SEO is so yesterday. The future is here with GenAO, AISO, and AIO - Our recent blog post gives an overview of getting discovered in the age of LLM search assistants

• 7 Innovative Retail Trends to Watch in 2025 - A nice summary of the gamut of retail considerations and how AI is woven into these functional areas.

• Shopping in 'God Mode' - If you want to go down the rabbit hole of startup ideas that are brewing in retail and ecommerce

• The AI Shopping Revolutions: How Agentic Shopping is Reshaping Ecommerce - An overview of how agents will reshape the shopping experience for both customers and retail brands

SEO is so yesterday. The future is here with AISO, GenAO, and AAO!

By Robyn White and Annie Deihl

This post was originally published on Women x AI

How to Get Discovered in the New World of Search

With the acceleration of AI development in just about every aspect of life, digital marketing is no different. From enhanced personalization and more comprehensive data analysis to automation of workflows, AI is transforming how the business of marketing gets done.

These changes are huge, but the biggest disruption is yet to come: search optimization becomes discoverability optimization. SEO isn't getting replaced; it's going 3D.

New Terms Hint At What's Coming

You may have heard of AIO (AI Optimization), but what about AISO (AI Search Optimization)? Or AAO (Autonomous Agent Optimization), LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization), GenEO (Generative Engine Optimization), and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)? Just alphabet soup? We wish!

Each of these initialisms relates to new, specific, important ways that customers and AI Agents will explore and shop.

Will one term eventually dominate all the rest?

The answer is so annoying—probably not.

At least for now, because AI is not just making search faster, it's changing what shows up in the results.

AI search engines reply to your questions (natural language queries) with direct answers and/or recommendations rather than a ranked list. To create these AI overview summaries, the LLMs value different indicators than standard SEO. For example, backlinks aren't valued as highly as well-structured content, like thorough tutorials and FAQs.

Additionally, content will be assessed for how AI systems understand, summarize, and reference information, drawing both on what models it's been trained on and on your input. Gulp! That means the "best" dog Perplexity recommends for you may not be mentioned when you ask Claude.

Separately, while there could be consolidation of AI companies, it's unlikely Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Mistral, and Meta will collapse into one giant, predominant AI company, so the model of one hegemonic dominating search source is unlikely to continue. Thereby lessening the chance that one single initialism will win out.

AI Agents are Evolving, Too

The other big factor at play is Autonomous Agents. Today, most think of AI Agents as the friendly bots encountered on AI conversation platforms (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok), as customer service agents, or even as hotel booking assistants. However, that's just one type of AI Agent, where the bot is taught how to complete "closed" tasks.

Soon, another type of AI Agent, an Autonomous Agent, will be able to complete "open" tasks, where it can reason and make decisions on your behalf.

So, for example, if you need a new refrigerator, your Autonomous Agent can find the most efficient, correctly sized, right color refrigerator for your home, including all the features you want, handle the financing arrangements, and go ahead and make the purchase and set up delivery. Pretty incredible!

How Do You Prepare for These Changes?

The good news is that there are several steps you can take now to help make sure your site is ready to meet the future. Here are a few suggestions to get you started:

• First, it's important to point out that SEO isn't going away because the AI models use training data (hello, world wide web!) and website summaries to predict their recommendations. E-E-A-T is still relevant and useful. Remember, OpenAI relies on Bing, so you'll want to make sure your site ranks well there, too.

• Second, make sure your site is accessible to the AI models and LLMs with content that is well-structured and indexed. Today, most AI platforms don't allow direct brand submissions for inclusion in overview summaries, though that seems to be changing with the introduction of OpenAI's "Search Product Discovery Initiative" and Perplexity's "Merchant Program."

• Third, similar to traditional Google Search, focus on high-quality content and seek third-party validation in the form of awards and partnerships; think industry-specific awards for excellence, as well as customer awards from Yelp!, TripAdvisor, and Trustpilot. Partnerships with other prominent brands or industry associations like the Better Business Bureau help build credibility. This is important because while SEO matches keywords, AI matches ideas and authority.

  
  

Finally, remember to monitor and test how the different models talk about your brand. You want to measure what's working best for each platform so you can adjust your strategy as you go. At least some things never change!