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Agentic Commerce · GEO · AEO · LLM SEO

Sell to AI shoppers.

ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews recommend products to shoppers every day. A practical guide to making your store discoverable in agentic commerce.

What is agentic commerce?

Agentic commerce is shopping mediated by AI agents — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude — that recommend products and answer commerce queries on behalf of the shopper.

Instead of typing "best running shoes" into Google and clicking through 10 tabs, the shopper asks ChatGPT and gets a single curated answer with three product recommendations and links. The agent did the comparison work. The shopper picks from a shortlist.

Merchants who optimize for the agent get recommended. Merchants who don't become invisible — not by rank, but by absence from the agent's source list.

Why your store is invisible to AI shoppers right now.

  • 01

    GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot are blocked or missing from robots.txt

    Most stores ship a default robots.txt that allows Googlebot but never explicitly allows the AI crawlers that index for ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. The AI agents skip the site silently.

  • 02

    Product data is not formatted as Schema.org Product JSON-LD

    AI shopping assistants quote structured data when they have it. Stores that ship product info as inline HTML without Schema.org Product markup get summarized incorrectly or skipped entirely.

  • 03

    Prices and stock are dynamic JavaScript that the crawler does not execute

    AI crawlers prefer server-rendered prices, stock counts, and offer status. Stores that hydrate this data client-side appear to the agent as "price not specified" — and never get recommended.

  • 04

    There is no public deal directory the AI agent can crawl

    AI shopping assistants surface deals when a public, crawlable directory exists. Stores that hide active sales behind email lists, popups, or app-store-only flows never appear in "best deals on X" answers.

The 5 things AI agents check before recommending a product.

  • 01

    Product data completeness

    Title, description, GTIN/SKU, brand, price, availability, condition. AI agents skip products missing any of these. Heartly's AI Readiness Tab scans your catalog and lists exactly which products fail and what to fix.

  • 02

    Schema.org Product markup

    AI agents consume Product, Offer, AggregateRating, and Review schemas. Heartly auto-emits Product + Offer JSON-LD on every flash sale page — no theme edits required.

  • 03

    Price clarity — no "from $X"

    AI agents quote the lowest-numbered offer they can extract. Stores that render "from $X" or "starting at" lose to stores that render a single concrete price. Heartly sale pages render one price.

  • 04

    Review aggregation visibility

    AggregateRating with reviewCount and ratingValue is the most-cited Schema.org property in AI shopping answers. Stores with reviews but no markup get bypassed in favor of stores with markup.

  • 05

    Mobile-first server-rendered HTML

    AI crawlers prioritize mobile-first server-rendered content. Heartly sale pages are server-rendered, mobile-first, with critical content above the fold — same priority order an AI agent uses.

How Heartly prepares your store for agentic commerce.

  • AI Readiness Tab

    Heartly Pro scans your catalog against the criteria AI agents actually use. Each product gets a score and a list of fixes. Pull the report monthly, fix the gaps, watch your AI-shopper visibility climb.

  • GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot indexing

    Every Heartly flash sale page is explicitly allowed for AI crawlers. deals.heartly.io is the public deal directory ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity crawl — your sale becomes discoverable to shoppers who never visited your store directly.

  • Server-rendered Product + Offer JSON-LD

    Every sale page ships with Product, Offer, and AggregateRating Schema.org markup baked in. No theme work, no liquid edits, no JavaScript-rendered prices.

  • Heartly mobile apps for direct push

    iOS and Android apps notify your shoppers the moment a deal goes live — a direct channel that doesn't depend on AI agents recommending you.

Run free AI Readiness scan →See all features →

Agentic commerce — FAQ.

  • What is agentic commerce?

    Agentic commerce is shopping mediated by AI agents — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude — that recommend products and answer commerce queries on behalf of the shopper. The shopper asks "what's the best deal on running shoes this week" and the agent returns curated results from across the web. Merchants who optimize for the agent get recommended. Merchants who don't become invisible.

  • What's the difference between SEO and GEO?

    SEO (search engine optimization) ranks pages in Google search results. GEO (generative engine optimization) ranks claims and product facts inside AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. SEO targets the blue links; GEO targets the synthesized paragraph that sits above them. The signals overlap (structured data, page speed, authority) but GEO additionally favors specific anchor sentences, Schema.org Product markup, and crawlable public APIs that AI agents can cite.

  • Will ChatGPT replace Google for shopping?

    Not as a binary replacement. ChatGPT Shopping launched in 2025 and Perplexity Shopping in 2024 — both are growing but represent under 5% of commerce queries today. The trajectory matters: agentic commerce is the fastest-growing share-of-query category in ecommerce. Stores that prepare now will compound the position over the next 3 to 5 years. Stores that wait until 20% query share will arrive too late.

  • How do I get listed in Perplexity Shopping?

    Allow PerplexityBot in robots.txt, ship Schema.org Product + Offer JSON-LD on every product page, render prices server-side, expose a public crawlable URL for each active sale. Heartly does all four by default on every sale page. Direct Perplexity submission is currently not open — discovery is purely crawler-based.

  • Is agentic commerce relevant for small stores?

    Yes — and arguably more relevant. Large stores have established Google SEO authority that they can lean on. Small stores have no such moat in classical SEO. Agentic commerce resets the playing field: AI agents value Schema.org completeness, fast page rendering, and Crawlable product feeds over domain age. A new store with perfect structured data can outrank a 10-year-old store with missing markup.

  • What is Google UCP (Unified Commerce Program)?

    Google UCP is the structured product feed program that powers Google Shopping, Google AI Overviews shopping results, and Google's emerging agentic commerce surface. Stores that submit clean UCP feeds get cited in AI Overviews. Heartly's AI Readiness Tab includes a UCP-feed audit that checks every product against the UCP schema and lists exactly which fields are missing.

  • How long until I see results from agentic commerce optimization?

    Crawler discovery: 2 to 6 weeks for GPTBot, 4 to 8 weeks for ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot. Citation in AI-generated answers: 6 to 12 weeks after structured data is in place. The signal compounds — once you appear in one agent's answers, others tend to follow because they crawl public citations.

  • Does optimizing for AI agents hurt my Google rankings?

    No. The signals that AI agents reward (structured data completeness, server-rendered HTML, fast mobile loading, public crawlable URLs) are the same signals classical Google SEO has rewarded for years. Optimizing for agentic commerce strengthens classical SEO at the same time.

Go deeper

Read the agentic commerce playbook.

Make your store discoverable to AI shoppers.

Heartly's AI Readiness Tab audits your catalog against ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overview ranking signals. Free 14-day trial.

Start free trial →See all features →