By Karen Scally. Original article from Gearflow: click here. Table of Contents It’s Designed For...
For two decades, buyers’ discovery and purchase of products have been shaped by one acronym: SEO. Google’s search engine defined how buyers discovered and bought products, how marketers structured content, and how distributors invested in digital visibility. Websites were built for algorithms, product data was optimized for crawlers, e-commerce sites, and entire marketing budgets were justified by who ranked on page one.
As we increasingly seek answers in generative platforms and abandon traditional search, that world is ending.
A new acronym is rewriting the rules: GEO – Generative Engine Optimization. It’s not about keywords or backlinks anymore. It’s about how agentic AI systems—ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity, and industry-specific agentic assistants like Trade Hounds—ingest, reason over, and recommend products in real-time conversations with buyers. Welcome to the Agentic Commerce Era, where structured product feeds, not webpages, decide who gets found and who is invisible. Who gets the order and who doesn’t.
With Gen Z digital native buyers becoming the dominant demographic, leaders and laggards in GEO will trigger a massive reshuffling of awareness, preference, and market share.
The Agentic Shift: From Search Engines to Decision Engines
In traditional SEO, discovery began with a search query. A crawler indexed billions of pages, ranked them by relevance, and presented ten blue links. Buyers clicked, browsed, compared, and eventually converted.
In Agentic Commerce, discovery begins with a conversation. A buyer might say to ChatGPT, “Find me a 480V variable-frequency drive compatible with Allen-Bradley motors, available in DFW for next-day delivery.” Instead of parsing links, the model consults structured merchant feeds—data files uploaded directly by distributors and manufacturers. The AI doesn’t crawl. It reasons. And in doing so, it determines which brand or distributor becomes the trusted recommendation inside the chat. In other words, the feed is the new homepage.
The Feed Is the Signal
OpenAI’s new Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) allows merchants to upload product feeds directly into ChatGPT, refreshed as often as every fifteen minutes. Those feeds are no longer one of many ranking factors—they’re the primary authority on your brand and your products.
For distributors and manufacturers, the implications are enormous:
- No more crawling: Visibility depends entirely on the data you supply.
- No more “Page One”: Ranking is conversational.
- No more static content: Freshness and trust determine recommendations.
Your product feed has become both your marketing strategy and your AI contract.
GEO is the discipline of shaping your data for generative AI visibility. Think of it as the successor to SEO—but with an entirely different rulebook:
SEO (Old World) vs. GEO (New World)
- Crawled pages vs. Structured data feeds
- SERP rankings vs. Conversational inclusion
- Backlinks vs Feed trust
- Quarterly updates vs 15-minute refreshes
GEO relevance and positioning will determine your buyer relevance and wallet share. GEO will tend towards virtuous cycles that lead to winner-take-all outcomes.
The Anatomy of GEO-Ready Data
Beyond the basics—title, description, price, and stock—GEO merchant feed introduces new attributes:
- Popularity score and return rate
- Rich media (video and 3D models)
- Custom variants (size, material, color)
- Geo-targeted availability
- Review sentiment
Each element expands your surface area of discovery and helps the AI understand your products like a human would. In the GEO world, marketing is data architecture. It’s about feeding AI the clearest, richest, and most trustworthy data possible. Marketers must become data storytellers—designing titles, descriptions, and attributes that mirror natural buyer intent. Building on social, the best marketers in the GEO era won’t just tell stories—they’ll design data.
Agentic Commerce Meets Distribution Reality
Your ERP already knows what’s in stock. Your PIM stores product attributes. Your CRM knows your customers. GEO connects these systems into a structured, outward-facing feed that agentic platforms can consume, matching conversational buyer intent to distributor data. This isn’t optional; it’s survival. Furthermore, generative systems validate your data. If your feed says “in stock” but checkout disagrees, you lose trust. Feed integrity equals AI visibility. Distributors that maintain consistency will dominate agentic recommendation flows.
Preparing for What Comes Next
Agentic commerce is still early. Sponsored placements, bundles, and AI-curated carts are coming. Buyers will soon order entirely within the chat window. To prepare:
- Build a feed.
- Map attributes to intent.
- Add media and reviews.
- Automate refresh cycles.
Freshness equals visibility.
The GEO revolution will separate those who adapt from those who wait. Distributors and manufacturers that embrace structured, conversationally aligned data will own the discovery layer of next-generation buyers. Those who cling to SEO will vanish from the digital shelf. The future of commerce will be found inside the conversation—curated and reasoned by intelligent systems that value clarity, trust, and data integrity above all else. The GEO era has begun. Your product data is your new sales rep. Your feed is your new storefront.
Read the original version on the NAW website here.
