Glossary
AEO (Agent Experience Optimization)
AEO is optimizing your product data for the AI agents that shop on a customer's behalf, so they can find, understand, and transact with your store, rather than optimizing a page to rank in a list of links.
On Shopify, AEO means optimizing what the Global Catalog holds about your products and how accurately Shopify's models infer your attributes, because that catalog is what AI shopping assistants read. It's the successor to SEO for AI shopping.
AEO grew out of Answer Engine Optimization, the earlier practice of structuring content to be the direct answer an engine returns rather than one of ten blue links. That content-and-citation work is the foundation; Agent Experience Optimization extends it to the commerce layer, where an agent reads your catalog literally and decides which products to recommend or buy.
It overlaps heavily with GEO and good SEO; all three prioritize clean, well-structured, citable data and strong Schema.org markup. You do all of them, and most of the underlying work serves each.