AI shopping, term by term

The words around getting products recommended by AI assistants, each explained for a store owner, with what Sighted does about it.

• Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the work of making your product data readable enough that an AI assistant names your products when a shopper asks for something like them.
• Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the umbrella term for getting generative AI to draw on your content and cite it. For a store, almost all of it is product data.
• Product data auditA product data audit reads your store the way an assistant does and reports what it could and could not see.
• ChatGPT product feedThe ChatGPT product feed is a full snapshot of your catalogue, one row per purchasable variant, in the columns OpenAI's specification lays out.
• Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is an open standard for an AI agent to discover a store, search its catalogue and, where the store allows it, check out.
• Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) is OpenAI's and Stripe's open standard for how an AI agent finds a product, builds a cart and completes a purchase with a merchant, while the merchant stays the seller of record.
• Product structured data (Schema.org)Product structured data is the part of a product page written for machines: the name, price, availability, identifiers and attributes in Schema.org's vocabulary, usually as a JSON-LD block in the page's head.
• AI crawlers and robots.txtAI crawlers are the bots each assistant uses to read the web, and a line in your robots.txt decides which of them may read your product pages.
• llms.txtllms.txt is a proposed text file that lists your site's content for AI crawlers. Some tools sell it as an AI visibility fix. The evidence does not back that up.
• Google product categoryThe Google product category is one value from a taxonomy of several thousand, and it tells every channel built on Google what a product is.
• Shopify Standard Product TaxonomyShopify's Standard Product Taxonomy defines categories and, for each one, the attributes a product can carry and the values they take. A dress's silhouette is Sheath, whatever your product page calls it.
• Brand voice in product contentBrand voice is the tone, rhythm and vocabulary your product content is written in. It is the first thing AI-written content loses.
• AI shopping readiness scoreAn AI shopping readiness score is one number out of 100 for how well an AI assistant can read a product, with a grade from A to F and the gaps that cost the most points listed first.