By Purva Gupta, Co-Founder and CEO of Lily AI
Key Takeaways:
- Consumers are fast adopting AI-powered shopping, with Millennials and Gen Z leading the way.
- Search queries are becoming longer and conversational since AI can now understand intent.
- Merrell is investing in PCO to boost product and brand visibility in new and existing environments.
In our recent eMarketer webinar with Jane Smith, VP of Digital Marketing at Merrell, Jane shed light on how Merrell is navigating and thriving in the shifting landscape of consumer discovery that is increasingly being influenced and impact by AI. As just one example, their customers are now searching using detailed, conversational queries averaging 23 words. Jane highlighted Merrell’s strategy to align product details with consumer search trends, emphasizing real-world context such as comfort, style, and usability in various environments. Jane also emphasized the importance of ongoing optimization and the seamless integration of Lily AI’s insights into Merrell’s existing systems to enhance consumer discovery.
The inspired some fantastic discussion as well as lively Q&A from the audience. With that, here are all the answers to your burning questions!
Q: What is GEO?
A: It sure is confusing when one web of concepts is known by so many distinct, yet related acronyms!
Let’s define GEO: An emerging new discipline that enhances digital content to be found and favored by AI-powered search engines. The retailer’s goal is similar to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which involves increasing product visibility organically and driving more traffic to an e-commerce website. Other related yet distinct terms and concepts include:
– AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
– GSO (Generative Search Optimization)
– AISO (AI Search Optimization)
– AIO (AI Overviews Optimization)
– LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization)
Q: What are the potential pitfalls when adapting to AI-powered search strategies?
A: Brands should avoid treating content optimization as a singular event. Instead, it must be viewed as a dynamic, ongoing effort continuously informed by new consumer trends and behaviors. Outdated or stale content also loses effectiveness in search engines and AI-driven environments.
This is where AI helps to scale the work. Content optimization is an always-on activity, whereby the AI constantly observes not only new consumer search queries, but also the performance of the content itself, and then dynamically adjusts the existing product content accordingly to maximize relevance and results.
Product content “freshness” and relevance are both key!
Q: How quickly will consumers transition from traditional search to AI search?
A: Retailers may feel justified in adopting a “wait and see” approach to investing in GEO search, citing slow consumer uptake, but that is simply not true. This moment is fundamentally different from prior innovation moments in advertising history.
The momentum behind GEO is being driven by end consumers themselves. Big Tech’s alpha and beta test environments for GEO-powered search and discovery have been met with enthusiasm, with people continuing to engage even before the final, more refined and accurate versions are released. This organic, consumer-led adoption stands in stark contrast to prior innovations, such as retail media, as an example where industry investment outpaced shopper awareness or demand. The surge in GEO usage signals that consumers are actively shaping this market, not just passively responding to industry initiatives.
To put this into numbers, in Lily AI’s consumer shopping survey conducted January 2025, 40% of consumers already reported using AI-powered search specifically for shopping. While younger generations are leading in AI adoption, with 41% of Millennials and 45% of Gen Z reporting utlizing AI for shopping, Gen X adoption wasn’t far behind at 32%!
Waiting on the sidelines risks missing a rare inflection point where consumer behavior (and not industry hype) is setting the pace for innovation and adoption.
Q: What technical aspects are often overlooked yet critical for GEO discoverability?
A: Traditional technical SEO included a whole checklist to maximize core web vitals, page speed, mobile optimization, etc. In the world of SEO and GEO, the importance of technical content is emerging as a critical pillar to help eCommerce sites communicate with AI through “machine speak”. This includes structured data such as Schema, Meta Titles and Descriptions, Alt Text, and more. This is content that consumers can sometimes see, and sometimes not, yet is fully optimized for search engine and AI indexability and crawlability.
Oddly enough, one of the most overlooked technical aspects of GEO might be the role of humans in initial data creation and accuracy. As the old saying goes, garbage-in, garbage-out. In our work, we’ve seen a lot of wildly inaccurate product data which needs to be analyzed, cleansed, and corrected before the real content optimization work can begin. We’ve seen items with the incorrect country of origin, completely incorrect fabric content, mythical details, and features. It’s a problem.
Last but not least, it can’t be stressed enough that we are living in a period where we must adapt and test while the inventions themselves are still being developed. So, as an example, in the old days of traditional SEO, it was (and still is) considered unethical to engage in Black-Hat SEO techniques such as keyword stuffing or hidden text and links. Now, new companies are emerging to create ghost versions of eCommerce websites, specifically designed to NOT be seen by humans but to be the source for AI agents. Think of it as a digital twin of your site. This may be a good short-term technological solution, yet we will see if this approach stands the test of time in terms of building consumer trust and operating with transparency, ethics, and scale.
Q: How can brands optimize user-generated content (UGC) effectively for GEO and AEO?
A: To optimize reviews and user-generated content for GEO and AEO, brands need to make this content easy for AI systems to understand and surface. This means structuring reviews with clear attributes and keywords, utilizing schema markup, and ensuring that images and videos have accompanying descriptive text.
It’s also important to analyze and highlight the real language customers use so AI can match consumer queries with authentic experiences and insights.
Finally, brands should measure which types of UGC drive the most discovery and conversions through GEO channels, and continually refine their approach. In short, treat UGC as a strategic asset: organize it, enrich it, and let it power your brand’s visibility in the new world of AI-driven search.
Q: With voice and visual search becoming prominent, how will Product Content Optimization (PCO) evolve?
A: The good thing about PCO is that while it is grounded in text-based data, voice, image, and video assets are able to be converted to text for context and intent understanding. PCO can handle the nuances of multimodal search and discovery because it understands natural language patterns and intent-driven inquiries.
Additionally, it can handle things such as multimodal alignment, cross-modal consistency, contextual metadata, and composite indexing, all of which are critical, especially in visual search scenarios. While text remains a foundational layer, due to GEO’s fusion of modalities, PCO is more of a synchronized system where every asset, whether spoken, written, or visual, reinforces the others through AI-native contextual signals. Brands that utilize PCO to optimize for this interplay can dominate in voice and visual search environments as much as they can in text-based ones.
Q: What new metrics are necessary for measuring the ROI of GEO initiatives?
A: To be sure, we need a new measurement framework for GEO’s ROI, combining AI-centric metrics with refined traditional KPIs to capture this new, unique value proposition. Here at Lily, we like to say, you need to be found in order to be sold. As such, share of voice around brand and product mentions will be critical as well as new, core GEO-specific metrics that are emerging now.
In Summary:
Key to Merrell’s strategy has been the implementation of Product Content Optimization (PCO) with Lily AI, which ensures product details and descriptions better align with the way consumers naturally speak, shop, and search.
To learn more, schedule a demo or time to meet in person at CommerceNext, June 24–26!