The Former Shopify Partner Manager on AI Search Optimization
"ChatGPT is not that sophisticated yet. So for marketers, what that means is there are real ways right now for arbitrage in this short period of time before ChatGPT gets good enough to say, no, we're only showing the proper result."
Mac King from Domaine breaks down why merchants are seeing ChatGPT and Perplexity show up as referral sources in their analytics—and what to do about it. We talked about the terminology wars (GEO vs AEO vs AI search optimization), why AI engines favor content from Google's 10th page, and the Reddit strategies that actually work without getting banned.
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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.
Kurt Elster
This episode is sponsored in part by Swim. Okay, here's a depressing stat. 70% of shoppers who want your products never actually buy them. They browse, they consider, then they forget. That's revenue walking out the door. Swim Wishless Plus turns browsers into buyers. Customers save products they want, get notified when prices drop, or items restock. You can also engage them in personalized fashion through your marketing or sales outreach. It's like having a personal shopper reminding them to come back and buy from you instead of your competitors. And 45,000 stores already use it, and it only takes five minutes to install. You could try it free today for 14 days. Go to get swim. com slash curt. That's swimwithay. com slash curt. Turn those maybe later into sales today. Get swim. com Oh my friends, today on the unofficial Shopify podcast, I want to share with you uh more, oh my gosh, more AI content. But hold on. Now I swear this will be practical and tactical. That's our bread and butter. I want you to walk away with strategies for optimizing. for these LLMs, these large learning models like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Because an interesting thing has occurred. Recently, I started running reports in our retainer client stores. for to check for referral source on new orders. You know, where we want to know where our new customer acquisition is coming from, because if there's new s new spaces where we're getting new orders and customers, we want to double down on that. And in several stores now, I'm seeing ChatGPT pop up as a refer, which I'm so excited about, also so frustrated because I can't see the conversation. I don't know what the heck they asked it. That got it to recommend our clients' products. Um, and then even perplexity. And so I went down this rabbit hole I put in every chat every AI uh referrer I could come up with. And it right now it seems to be chat GPT and perplexity. So okay, this idea, this concept of how do we optimize for that? How do we do SEO for AI? What's that look like? Is that real? Man, I need we're all still figuring this out together. And so I need someone who's actively working on it, who's been in the space a while, who's gonna talk it through with us. And that's Matt King from Domain and also uh formerly of Shopify. Mac, welcome back to the show. God, what is this? Your third appearance?
Mac King
Second appearance. Um although i the last one was actually well third appearance if you count some of your like roundups from editions.
Kurt Elster
The lightning interviews, yeah, from conferences for sure.
Mac King
Yes, but my second direct 101. Uh glad to be back. I'm stoked to be talking to you today, Kurt. We go back. So this is goofong.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, you were back in the day, you were uh Shopify Partner Manager.
Mac King
I was. Yeah, that's how I how I cut my teeth. I mean before that I was a I was a customer service agent, which Shopify used to call gurus until that became somewhat cancelable.
Kurt Elster
Uh yeah, we canceled the term guru.
Mac King
Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. At least like no 23-year-old guy from Ottawa, Canada should have been called a guru. Yeah, moved into the partnerships, you know, m ye worked with you for a couple of years while I was at Shopify and worked with a number of different agencies. while I was at Shopify. I left a a while ago now, 2018. So, you know, it's been a while since I worked there, but uh it was certainly I mean it was so fun.
Kurt Elster
But all right, so today, if you're not at Shopify anymore, what are you doing?
Mac King
Yeah, good question. I mean, so I I left Shopify to join my favorite agency at the time. Uh I'd met a number I managed agencies mostly in New York City. Um I owned uh oh I sorry I managed an agency called Half Helix, which is a 10-person agency run by a developer based out of New York. And it was kind of this undercover if you know, you know, you know, you have Felix is good that dump team. Um so I left in in and pitched the founder of Half Felix Peter, who's my now business partner. I said, I'll I'll leave Shopify, I'll join your agency, and I'll be the Harley to your Toby. I embarrassingly I actually used that line. So, you know, but it worked. I was like, I'll I look out and I'll be the face and I'll do sales and marketing and partnerships and you know, you run the business and run the engineering and uh and and that yeah, that worked to secure my partnership. So I left Shopfi joined as a partner in HappyLix. Um that was in tw January 2019. Since then, we merged with another, well, we bought an agency called AplSense based out of Halifax, um, which is now our mid-market and SMB offering called Domain Studio. And then we merged with another agency, our biggest competitor at the time called Tomorrow. Um, you know, and we were competitive. It was the capulets and the monoges, you know, like you've we fought for clients and employees and Uh and then we're gonna be merged informed domain. And now now we're the largest yeah, we're the largest Shopify I can see. Which large doesn't mean anything of itself. The important thing is the best. So you know I I think we're the best. But yeah.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, well I would you know I would agree with with largest, you know, taking three three agencies that were not small and combining them and then, you know, continuing to scale and grow that. has been well it's you know it's been fun to watch for me. But you know one of your your more recent service offerings that you just announced was this concept of optimizing for AI. And yeah We've touched on this on the show before, and it evolving so quickly. The first thing I want to establish is what the heck do we call it? There's no way we could keep referring to it as SEO for AI. There's gotta be a better term. And I know you have thoughts here.
Mac King
I have thoughts, but you my thoughts are so it's funny. At first we're like, okay. GEO. I saw it online. People are calling it GEO. We're going to refer to it as that. And then I got into a sales call and we started saying GEO, just casually. And then at one point I got interrupted by a prospect and he goes, Hey, what's GEO? You know, so uh you you forget that we're in this bubble, this little tech bubble where you see the latest and greatest terms and you're not always, you know. They're not widely represented. And then as we got deeper and deeper into doing our analysis, we realized that AEO was another accepted term for the exact same. DEO, AEO. I've also seen A I O. Um, so what we've decided, which sounds like kind of like old McDonald, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A-I-A-I-O.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, it was like A-I-O, A-E-O. AI AIO seemed like the obvious one, AI optimization, right? But the one I've seen, at least like you know from other marketers on social media, which you know, take that with a grain of salt has been uh GEO, G O, which I don't even know what it stands for.
Mac King
It's generative engine optimization.
Kurt Elster
Generative engine optimization. Yeah, you're right. For when the SEO people want to optimize for AI and SEO, they went with neither of those terms entirely. Brilliant.
Mac King
Well, and then there's AEO, which is answer engine optimization.
Kurt Elster
Answer engine.
Mac King
Yeah. All of these technologies that are being built to support AI search optimization are also all having to pick their accurate. So Profound, which is maybe the the most it advanced AI search tracking tool, or at least the most like it's found its market fit, you know, it's the most expensive for sure. Uh they they're they're using it AEO. Um but a different one called Athena, for example, might use GDO. So the the truth is it's too new. The acronym has not been solved yet. We don't know what it's called. So therefore, domain, we're choosing to just say AI search optimization. It's a mouthful, but we're waiting for the acronym thing to play out. Yeah.
Kurt Elster
And so the way the tools you mentioned were profound.
Mac King
And Athena.
Kurt Elster
Athena SEO.
Mac King
Yeah, well Athena, I think it's called Athena, I got the wrong one. Athena. ai.
Kurt Elster
Athena HQ. ai?
Mac King
Yes, Athena HQ. ai. And there's others. There's Cognisio. Um there's Gum loop or gumshoe, I can't remember which one. So there's like this arms race right now of all these different prompt tracking softwares that are Basically, like think of like SEM rush, but for AI cert optimization. Uh we did we we've done uh demos with all of them. Uh and we've seen they all have like similar pricing. They're all backed by different you know, YC, you know, combinator. Like they're they all have this like this private equity veil or sorry, venture capital veil in front of them and they're just sell it. Like the the demand is there. And these companies are just taking off.
Kurt Elster
And the essentially the idea is currently if I want to track successive SEO, I would have keywords I'm interested in, and there are tools that will automate showing me like, well, here's the average pos ranking position that this gets. Versus these, you know, the this new flavor of tool will tell me will try to estimate how often my brand would get mentioned by, you know, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or similar tools.
Mac King
Exactly. Yeah, what they'll do is they'll call it like 15 to 20 different prompts, you know. The big difference, right, between SEO and let's call it GEO.
Kurt Elster
So wait, is that what we're going with? We're going with GEO?
Mac King
I'm just gonna say that just for as a shorthand for this conversation so I don't have to say AI search optimization. Well, so you know there's SEM rush, AREFs, there's all these tools that SEO specialists have been using for years to monitor individual keywords. The biggest difference between GEO and SEO is the length of the prompt, right? An average prompt is 33 words in length versus like an average keyword, which is one to three words in length. So all th there's this this entire new industry of software that's come that's spun up in order to track prompts. And the problem is that there's so much demand right now and there's so many businesses that are focusing on this who don't know what to buy that You know, this is a fairly commoditized tool, at least in the SEO space. Like it's you all you're doing is tracking keywords. So companies are overspending on this software in the SAI search optimization space right now because they just It's just so new. So I I I recommend for people who are who are interested in tracking prompts and who who are interested in looking at AI search optimization, don't go with a don't spend a thousand dollars a month on a tracking. Like do a little bit more research and you know this is going to be commoditized in six twelve months. It will be.
Kurt Elster
Uh yeah. Yeah. I think right now you're still on like your bleeding edge tool and so they're able there's an appetite for it and they're able to charge more for it. You're absolutely right. There's not gonna be a huge difference between these tools over time and they'll have to compete on price, especially as, you know, more uh more people enter the market. And certainly, you know, a lot of the existing SEO tools are I'm sure building or looking at you know the same features for their tool sets.
Mac King
Uh well that that's true, but Kurt, I struggle with that that mentality, which is you're right, all the traditional STO tools are gonna be building in AI search functionality. The same way that every traditional Shopify app has been all of the sudden claims to be AI integrated.
Kurt Elster
Oh, that drives me nuts.
Mac King
But what's what's going on there? It's so it's so hard to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of like who actually is using LLMs at a foundational level when it comes to Shopify apps. Uh because it w they've all adjusted their marketing to say that they're AI integrated. So, you know, I I I I pity the new comer into Shopify space who who can't tell the difference, you know, who who's really been foundationally AI.
Kurt Elster
This really seems very similar to SEO. It's like, all right, let's say I sit, you know, I sell shorts. You know, I'm I in in Google I'd be optimizing for like you know, best men's shorts. And then my long tail keyword phrase would be like best men's shorts for vacation. Right. Um My Wi-Fi has an excellent uh search ranking for uh best shorts for Disney World, I believe, or like best anti-chafing shorts for Disney World. You would not believe the number of people who do that search. It is it's crazy. And so then like the I'm applying that same concept to AI where in s you know instead of doing the Google search, the person is just asking ChatGPT or they're asking. perplexity, which a little different, you know, so a tool like ChatGPT or Claude or like a traditional chatbot, you know, is what these AIs are. They're They have a database that they're going through. And then there's like the answer engine version, like perplexity, where I ask it the question, it then is going to do a series of searches and then summarize the results for me. Are there different that's what we're talking about, right?
Mac King
It's just trying to get Oh yeah.
Kurt Elster
Mentioned more often. Okay. How? Like what's the what's the I get the why we want to do this, right? I don't want to keep paying for meta. I don't want to keep paying for PPC ads. And, you know, if I perceive my competitors are doing this, I feel the pressure to do it too. But in theory, if I can manage this, I am getting potentially free unlimited traffic from these search engines recommendations. Same as traditional SEO. If I'm thinking through this, perplexity is getting the answers from Google. And so traditional SEO may be the optimization there. Chat GPT and similar is from the data they have scraped from the internet that they're just constantly updating. They need more to make the models smarter and smarter. How do I optimize for that? I mean they're still getting the data from the web, right?
Mac King
Here's the truth is that it's mostly SEO. You know, uh it it's like if if brand If brands currently have an SEO strategy, they're going to be most of the way there when it comes to GEO or AI search optimization. So Now there is a chasm, 70% SEO. There's another 30% on top of that. That's specific to this new um this new world. So I that's probably where we should focus on. I mean, i if you know SEO or if you have an SEO agency or your friend, you know. for a different for a different brand, hire them. The um because you will start showing up better on search results. Now, I mentioned earlier the biggest difference is the size of the prompt versus the size of the keyword. So how do you like the the first step in in showing up on ChatGPT when someone's chatting, like what's the best beauty brand for dry skin? is to start tracking it. You know, create a custom dash flow. Look at 10 to 20 different prompts and and analyze what prompts you want to be showing up for in ChatGPT results. Now, the way to find those prompts can also be done through it through traditional SEO. Look at your organic keywords Um, why are people coming to you through Google? Why are what paid ads are you bidding on? What what keywords are you bidding on through Google Analytics and what's performing the best? Now take those 10 to 15 keywords that you're bidding on through Google or Meta. Bring them into ChatGPT and ask them, hey, I'm a beauty brand that focuses on people with dry skin. Here are the keywords I'm using for Google. Can you create 10 to 15 prompts that people would use to discover the same brand? Uh that I'll start tracking for AI search optimization. Ask ChatGPT for your own answer. So how how how you can get found on them. And they'll come up with 15 prompts. And that's what you should use to start. Also, go through your own thought process, you know, think about what prompts you think you should be um uh showing up for and and incorporate some of those as well. But uh yeah. The the first step is to start tracking.
Kurt Elster
Here's a word from our sponsor, Zippify. You know why they call it Black Friday? It's when businesses finally dig out of the red and turn real profit. Wanna squeeze every penny from your Black Friday sale? One click upsell is the easiest money you'll make all season. OCU automatically increases average order value by up to thirty percent with AI powered upsells at every step of your customer journey. Plus, there's a new tool built right in, Zippify Post Profit. Post Profit monetizes your thank you page with brand safe ads from partners like Hulu, GoDaddy, and Disney Doesn't cost you anything. Just switch it on and get paid pure profit for every view automatically. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas. Earn up to thirty percent more from every order all year long. Don't leave money on the table this holiday season. Go to zipify dot com slash curt for your thirty day free trial. That's zipify dot com slash K U R T. Okay. So it's yeah, yes, this overlaps significantly with existing SEO, and the keyword strategy does too, and that's where we want to start. And so I want to use keywords I'm bidding on plus, you know, if I use Google Search Console, I can get the terms that I'm ranking for. Google Search Console's free. You really should uh set your site up with it if you haven't yet. Um and then once I've got that, it's pretty easy to turn around and give the context to you know my AI tool of choice, chat GPT or Claude. I like Claude. um and have it, you know, essentially like rephrase those into questions for me. Then, all right, then I turn around, I use these uh a tool, um like profound. That will then ask automated, you know, ask those questions of the AI search engines and then tell me how often it recommends them. Because there's there's like a little bit of randomness to it as well.
Mac King
Yeah, there is, right? You can ask the same question three different times in the ChatGPT and get different answers each time, right? Um You know, Kurt, I'm sure you've done this. I've done this, right? Um go to ChatGPT and ask who's the best Shopify partner for you know helping brands in this segment, right? And and see what they come up with. And every time I ask that question, I I research you know our own business. they they're giving me a different list. Um and I I often don't know where they're pulling from. I mean you can do a little bit of research into how they've pulled from, but that's also what they're doing through those those tracking tools is You so you come up with 10 to 15 prompts you want to start tracking. They'll show you how you're ranking on those prompts. Meaning you're showing up 10% of the time, you're showing up 50% of the time, you're showing up 100% of the time. Rare. Um and here's why you're showing up because of this article, or here's why your competitor's showing up because of this article. So we that that Chat GBT found on the 11th page of Google that talked about how you know, how to how beginners can make the best cup of coffee. Um the other thing to think about from a brand perspective is should you be focusing on this channel right now? Because it is early. Um and and what kind of people are using AI tools in order to make purchasing decisions? Well, the dorks, you know, the the the the the the the early comers of new tech. Uh that's who's making decisions. So we found that our brands who are having the most success optimizing for AI right now. are people who sell the dorks. And I'm a dork. Um, I like coffee. I want a good cup of coffee. Bello, which is a client of ours that makes like, you know, the perfect cup of they have a bunch of coffee devices for people who really care about like the temperature in and in in in the thickness of of of of the blade when you actually round up coffee beans and uh you know uh how to keep how to maintain a hot cup of coffee on your right on your desk at the right temperature. Those are the people who are going to chat. tools and and asking for an analysis on on what they should buy. So if you're a brand that that that has customers who are doing a deep level of analysis on your product, You should be thinking about getting on this now, even though, yeah, it's uh it's a bit early.
Kurt Elster
For sure if I have a a technical product or I have a product that potentially appeals to uh to to techie folks. But even then, you know, the brands, our retainer clients were, you know, I'm starting to see this. Not at all technical. You know, one sells bags, another sells tea. Right. And that surprised me. Cause, you know, I thought of it the way you did. Um, you know, and it's not a huge percent, you know. a a fraction of 1% is the reality. But seeing it on these, you know, very totally normal brands. really surprised me because this is the thing that it well like Shopify Editions, it was clear that this is the future that Shopify envisions potentially happening here is you know we just use We communicate and shop with and do everything with, you know, an AI agent, essentially functioning as like a personal assistant. That's the future we're betting against here, or betting on rather, um, and hedging against.
Mac King
Not only are are the people at fellow who care about the perfect cup of copy cup of coffee caring about AI search optimization, but so are a hundred and fifty-year-old brand that sells home home goods. That's the shocking part. is that it's on everybody's mind right now, which means that it's overhyped. Like, you know, no one's gonna be looking for a a plate of fine china through Chat GPT and making a purchasing decision like that. Right now. I'm sure of it. You know, and at least if for firm percentage of traffic wise, a fraction of one percent as you mentioned, that's absolutely true. I think it'll be true for the next six, twelve months. But still, we're early. Um, yes. Is it overhyped? Yes. Um But if if what you're doing is mostly SEO anyway, then it can't can't help. Sorry, it can't hurt. It'll only help your business. So at least at the very worst base outcome, you'll improve your own site's SEO, which is still a good outcome. And the very best outcome, you're gonna start getting real sales from AI search tools, which is a you know really good one.
Kurt Elster
The I want to ask the inverse question. Are there black hat tactics that we shouldn't do? Is there, you know, in SEO there are things that you should not do that bad actors or people looking for, you know? the uh the easy cheat, the quick workaround the hack will attempt. Do those same strategies exist in in Geo?
Mac King
I believe so, yes. I think there's twofold, which one AI written content. I mean, let's talk about that for a second. Because what's gonna like the other thing all these tools do that track your keywords is they'll say, hey, your competitors, which you also input, you know, 10 to 15 competitors, by the way. these tools so they'll not only are they monitoring your own uh geo tracking they're monitoring how your competitors are showing on on AI search and Um and then they'll say your competitor's showing up for how to make um how to wear the best dress to a w uh a spring wedding. Um and and it's because of this one very specific article that they have on their website. Would you like me to write the same article in different wording for your own website? And then you click yes. And then it'll just create a whole blog post for you about how to how to have the perfect dress for a spring wedding that you can then copy, paste, put on your website, boom. But it's written by AI. Now There's a level of sophistication. AI tools can tell what content was written by AI. So right now there's a little bit of arbitrage. They're not that great at tell at being able to tell. And those articles are still helping companies rank. But that's gonna be the first thing. I'm I'm sure. The first thing when AI tools get more sophisticated is they're gonna cut out AI written content. And it's just not gonna rank for shit. Um so I would recommend brands stay away from actually coming up with w uh with with leveraging AI to write content for you, think for you. If you Like, feel free to leverage AI to edit your content, make it cleaner, make it look better, make it sound better. But the actual thought behind it, no. That's not gonna work, and that's not gonna work like that.
Kurt Elster
where people get tripped up is it is not creative. Do not think of it as a creative tool. If you give it, you know, if you treat it as an editor, well suddenly it's quite extraordinary. Right. And so I think it's like, okay, you could work with it. It's like, hey, this, you get a garbage in, garbage out. You know, if you give it, if you're just like, write me a blog post, it's not going to be any good. um versus, you know, if I give it enough context to start with on like this is my audience, this is my the problem, this is the solution, this is the brand background. This is the topics we want to write on. Let's brain s let's brainstorm those topics. Okay, great. Now that you got that, these are the points I want to hit. Is that a good outline? Like you can walk through a writing process with it. Um, or ideally, you know, like do a rough draft yourself and be like, okay, what's missing? One of my favorite questions to ask could just go, well, what do you really think? And then it like often that's the way to get it to to give you actual critique on it. Um and then punch it up that way. But yeah, this what's interesting about LLMs is if you train them on AI generated data, they fall apart, right? And I think you're right. They'll quickly, you know, learn to identify the what is obviously AI written content because it has like clear syntax and formatting that's like chat GPT signing its own name, right? We've all heard about the M-dash. Don't do M-dashes. So we need, again, it's funny this age of AI and optimizing for it. We're like, well, don't use it. Use humid written content. You're right. I think you're right. But still, again, more like it's traditional SEO. Again, we're like, we're writing blog posts, man.
Mac King
Dude, it's back to basics. That's the that's the real secret sauce too is that like it's it's back to basics when it comes to SEO. It's SEO 1. 0 or maybe 1. 5. You know, it's not like I'm making a fake like using the same um color of font as my background color and like in jamming a website with with stuffing it with keywords. Yeah, keywords, right? It's not quite that far back, but it's the it's the one phase after that. You know, it's just like coming up a blog post where any content that prompts can identify as an authority source and pull back to your website. But that's that simple. Um and there's other things to talk about as well. But the other part that you mentioned kind of like what are the black hat tactics? Um and like what are things we should avoid? I think Reddit, you know, um Reddit is a huge source of of material for LLMs. Um, you know, n maybe non surprisingly, but like there's a lot of chatter happening. There's a Shopify Reddit group. There's all sorts of e-commerce group. roots, you know, and they're gonna pick up that as a source. You know, what's the best Shopify approach? Or how do I, you know, increase my conversion rate? And um these are places that that Shopify is going to reference. What's the b or or beauty? You know, um I have oily skin, what product should I Uh, you know, that's where a lot of these references are are going to be taking place and a lot of the information LLMs are gonna be referencing. Now, how do you When it comes to a marketer's perspective, their first instinct when they know that Reddit's gonna be important is okay, okay, I'm gonna set up bot, I'm gonna make a channel, I'm gonna, you know, track all these all the chatter. I'm gonna make sure my my ten different new bot accounts respond on every one of these posts. Um and that is not the way I see you shaking your head. No, that's gonna be that'll get people banned, booted, and removed from the community. Pretty quickly. Reddit does a great job at self-moderating. The so the hard answer, instead of like that naughty way of just creating a bot and automating your responses, is like you actually have to engage with the community. You know, you have to figure out what you know, bring on a community member of your team or um, you know, do it yourself. Are are you the owner? Like like tr start track Reddit activity and then Respond with real thoughtful answers that identify who you are and why you have the authority on that topic. And Reddit will still find that. That's a more engaged and specific strategy, not suitable for everyone, obviously. But um important to note, I think like don't try and game Reddit because that's gonna get you gooted.
Kurt Elster
No, I think that but I think that's really good advice because Like if you do a search, especially a recommendation or like review type search, um perplexity will always come back. Like because it cites its sources and you will always see it looking through Reddit for info. for exactly the reasons you cited. And part of it's like they know, you know, re you're going to get the the chances are you're going to get a real human written response from an actual person perusing Reddit versus, you know, like blog review sites where it's this very, you know, probably paid for at some point editorial content. Um, and we know Reddit like that's definitely the the direction these LLMs go to get fresh non-AI content is like, hey, let's go to Reddit. Um And Reddit has licensing agreements to give this content to to these AIs to to train it. And so for sure, like that pipeline is there. So if you could get consistent recommendations. in Reddit that's gonna start to appear in these AI results. Okay. Smart. Um sm you know smart and depending on like how much effort it takes You know, it really like oftentimes when you see it cite something, it'll be like one person had a question and then, you know, a couple people commented and it will grab and summarize just that. And so I don't think you have to go huge to see an impact. from those Reddit comments.
Mac King
Absolutely right. And it also what that also means is like you don't have to wait for them to become new. Go find an old post that already exists. You're selling Doghouses and there's a doghouse subreddit. I hope there's not, but there might be. I don't think a doghouse subreddit would be about actual doghouses. I think that's But if there if you can find uh a post on Reddit asking for what's the best doghouse in the market, well even if it was written two years ago, go ahead and respond to that now. You know, and and and ma give a little bit of fresh activity to that post that already is out there. And let's see if it gets picked up through all those.
Kurt Elster
See, yeah. Okay. Are there other sites? Are there other watering holes we think that these these AIs tend to favor?
Mac King
Well, they're favoring pretty basic blog content in a way that Google has kind of moved past. That's one thing that we've realized through looking at some of the tracking. And again, all focused on my own business, right? I'm kind of obsessed with how Um how how accurate has ChatGPT got domain? You know, if I talk about, you know, who's like I'm a VP of e-commerce at a $250 million e-commerce brand migrating from Salesforce to Shopify. Who are five Agencies I have to talk to, you know, and I'll so I'll I'll use an exact prompt. And they'll give me five agencies that I've never heard of. And I know that I shouldn't talk to them. You know, and I you know, so I I'm like, okay, that's interesting. Why are they showing up? So you can actually through some of these tracking tools view the authority source that that Chat GP is using as to why those agencies are showing up. So I'll click on that and look through. And what I found was an article on the tenth page of Google, literally the 10th page, that was written. Four and a half years ago on like one of those really spammy blog posts that have like ads kind of like plastered all around the entire thing of like here are the top ten Shopify agencies that you need to talk to about your store. You know, clearly just like a
Kurt Elster
Random spam piece of content that somebody's like goofy listicole but make money for like get rich quick with ad sense ten years ago.
Mac King
Yes. That's been relegated to the tenth page of Google and Google would never showcase as a real result, but but ChatGPT is. So you know. Over the last twenty years, believe it or not, Google got pretty good at showcasing what the right results were on page one. Chat 3BT is not that sophisticated yet.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, that that Google algorithm, like that's this black box. You know, this it so much effort has gone into that. versus, you know, ChatGPT has solved for an AI and done a great job at it, but now we also expect them to solve search ranking algorithms too. Like that It's tough. I get why this is interesting. I had not thought of it this way. But yeah, it's essentially like you're doing SEO, but you know, SEO as it was 10, 15 years ago is what it sounds like.
Mac King
Oh yeah. Well yeah. Good luck. Chat GPT, you're you're about to go up against a swath of internet marketers trying to outgame the system. Good luck. You know, took Google 200 CO people. Exactly.
Kurt Elster
They're a creative bunch.
Mac King
Yeah. And so there are real ways right now for arbitrage in this short period of time before ChatGPT gets good enough to say, no, we're, you know, we're only showing the proper result. you know, that make sure that both Ethercycle and Domain show up every single time someone has that prompt on bunch attribute. You know, that's
Kurt Elster
That's um I've been just spamming Reddit right now.
Mac King
Oh, you have During this call, yeah.
Kurt Elster
Yes. Yeah, as we're going. Here's some customer service emails you don't want to wake up to. I was drunk. This was a gift, but we broke up. Wrong color, wrong size, wrong me. Sound familiar? With Cleverific, you don't have to deal with these anymore. Cleverific gives your customers a self-service portal to edit their own orders. No emails, no back and forth. Just simple fixes, fewer support tickets, faster fulfillment, and happier customers. Peter Manning New York slash their order support requests by 99%. You can too. Get 50% off the Cleverific Pro Plan, just forty nine dollars a month, exclusively for the unofficial Shopify podcast listeners. Go to Cleverific dot com slash unofficial and use promo code Kurtfifty. Fix the problem before it's a problem. That's Cleverific. What okay, so then like that's very much off-site SEO, you know, that we're engaging in here with the Reddit comments. The blog stuff is on site, that's content marketing. What about technical on-site SEO? You know, one of the a recent thing uh an SEO agency that I like a lot asked us to implement on a client site was Incredibly sophisticated structured data, schema markup. So you know you could um obviously you know this is but On your website, you can any Shopify theme now, you know, that's from the the Shopify theme store is going to be required to output uh structured markup data in a language called JSON and it'll essentially spell out in a like cleanly formatted way what the search engine's looking at. Like this is the title, this is the description. It is a product. This is the price. Here's the photos. Yeah. And that way it just makes it very easy for the um search and understand. They have you could really expand this like beyond just a product. And so I did this on a page and I had AI help me write this with like additional statements. Where it would be like, I, you know, it was for phone cases. And I'd be like, all right, if it if the title has leather in it, now there's a separate structured markup for material and we're gonna describe the leather. Like we went crazy with it. Um, I have no idea if that'll make a difference or it'll do anything. It was a fun problem to solve. What are your thoughts on, you know. structured data or like this on-site you know technical optimization.
Mac King
Yeah, absolutely table stakes to have real structured data using H1, H2, H3 tags properly on every individual page of your Shopify theme. The reason why it's actually particularly important for Shopify is that we've seen a couple like you know either you have a theme from Shopify's theme store and you've gone through this as like a DIY, you know, project, you've built something yourself, or maybe you've worked with an agency. We've Over the over time, they've built their own kind of like approach to theming on Shopify. And that means that they've kind of built this this kind of like beginning point where they can implement your brand, how how you want your look and feel to be. Um, but some agencies we've seen are are are using their structured content wrong at a foundational level for their theme kit. So we're getting these websites, you know, coming to us for a retainer or or or and seeing that like the theme kit in and of itself has been set up in a way. way where it's just using H1 tags through the entire website. Right?
Kurt Elster
And a brand might not pass accessibility when you don't get the You don't follow that hierarchy. So it's like, okay, that's a problem. Bad for SEO, that's a problem. You know, bad for just like a whole series of things. Drives me nuts when someone goes, I got a custom theme, so I can't change my settings. It's like no, you have an unfinished theme.
Mac King
That's Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah. Let's just finish it for you and make sure you can change your settings and address all these SCL challenges. So that that's why this is a particularly hard challenge for a lot of store owners and you know, the directors of e-comm is because like is this the unseen. You can't it's not obvious to you unless you're kind of in the in the code and looking at the technical technical detail of how your site is structured. But having true structured data is just, you know, table stakes for SEO and AI search optimization. And everyone listening to this call should make sure that their data is structured properly using their Shopify theme. And you might all be surprised that's not. Um, so number one tablespoon. Now the other thing for on-site SEO that we're we're starting to see, which is more of an experiment, right? Like you know, everyone's learning how to do AI search optimization at the same time. time so a lot of this is experimental but having an lms. txt file um sit on your root domain um it it's
Kurt Elster
LLMs. txt file. I have implemented this on our retainer client sites. It is not difficult to do. And you make the llms. txt file, upload it to files in Shopify, and then set up a redirect for slash LLMs. txt to that file. I've done it. Do we think it does anything?
Mac King
Good question. Um well you can actually tell. Like in some cases we run tests and And you can look at the source for a a response to um a chat GPT query and it'll actually reference that TXT. So it's happening for our website, for example, for our own uh uh llms. txt file. Um so I assume it's gonna work for brands. We're we're not suggesting it for for for commerce companies and brands.
Kurt Elster
It's so easy to implement too. It's like even if you don't think it works on the off the one percent chance it does, just do it.
Mac King
Oh, absolutely. You know, Shopify's got one. Shopfi. com. Um. If you go, yeah, if you go to shopfi. com forward slash you know lms. txt, you'll you'll see theirs. There's just very basic, very simple. And I think m you know for most companies you're gonna want to have a little bit more data in there, a little more enrichment. But yeah, why not? It can't hurt.
Kurt Elster
The and the like the background here is the the idea is It is resource intensive for an AI to process a website. And so you give it essentially like a a simple, straightforward summary written in Markdown, which is, you know, a a language that is very efficient for uh AIs to use and you're real it incredibly simple to write. There's nothing to it. In fact the AI can just write it for you. And then that way they have kind of an o like this is an overview of the site. It confirms the understanding of the site. And then maybe it has like a few key links that you're trying to highlight.
Mac King
Exactly. And guess your point across. You know, we've found that, yeah, again, it might be completely unnecessary. Well, I found that like on a B2B basis. um uh uh chat is not showing the right results but when i dive in to do an analysis on our on my own company on domain for example they'll get our positioning right without a little bit more of a prompt. And maybe that's coming from the the the the text file that that's on our root domain. But may maybe it's just coming from looking at our our marketing in our homepage. And uh so yeah again it might be doing nothing but at the very least it's not going
Kurt Elster
The other what technical one I've done, and I like I honestly I don't think this does anything, um, is in robots. txt, which is a file that's Shopify serves up that says like these are the pages a search engine is allowed to access. These are the ones it should ignore. And we do this for the benefit of crawl budget. You know, we don't want We don't want uh something like Google wasting time indexing, you know, nonsense pages when it should be focused on products and collections. And it's Well, we can also do that with this robot. txt file is explicitly say, you know, hey, these crawlers, these AI crawlers, you are allowed to access the site and encouraged to do so. But I mean the default is we're not disallowing them to begin with. So the chances are that one is like, you know, it doesn't hurt. It's probably also not doing anything. But, you know, it makes me feel good, so I keep doing it. Do we think Customer reviews play a role. Are they advantageous?
Mac King
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you know, the the LLMs are going to be looking to wherever they find that there's going to be thoughtful dialogue about your brand. Period. And if you can host your own, again, you know, hosting your own customer reviews is a bit of a hack, right? Because like you want to surface the right reviews. to your potential buyers uh and use your own review software to to do so. Um and but uh uh but but you you should absolutely do that not just on your homepage even try it in your LM's you know, duck duck text file, you know, have a couple reviews there for them to access easily. Let's see how that goes. Um but uh yeah servicing customer reviews that's It'll be something that LLMs are paying attention to that ChatGPT is looking for when they're trying to get a sense for what how are people really using your product?
Kurt Elster
Yeah, years ago, people occasionally I would get asked like, oh what do you do in optimize for voice search? And this is when like smart speakers exploded onto the market. And you know the smart speakers are really cool, like Alexa. Um and we, oh, we gotta optimize for voice search. How do you optimize for voice search? And of course, you know, that didn't go anywhere. It didn't really happen. Um with you know, optimizing for AI search for LLMs. This one's feels much more real to me, right? I think it's easy to dismiss, um, but I don't I don't think you should. And especially since I think all of the efforts we've described have additional benefits. You know, it overlaps with SEO, it overlaps with accessibility. I think you know that makes it a a worthwhile endeavor, even if you don't think that this is going to play out long term.
Mac King
Completely agree. Um, you know, think of it like you're contributing to the other things that you know you already need. A more accessible website not only helps you, you know. Achieve an accessibility bar that allows you not to get sued by you know the online lawyers of the world, but also it helps you sell more, it makes your site easier to navigate. So you're gonna make some more sales just by having an accessible website. Um, if you're focusing on AI search optimization, you're gonna be focusing on SEO. You're gonna show up better organic search results. Even if this AI search thing proves to be way overhyped, All of our charts showing the exponential growth are wrong. Uh in six months we've all just gone back to using Google. At the very least, you'll show up higher on Google. So why not? Yeah, why not engage with it? Don't bury your head in the sand.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, I think the way to think of it is like, well, do you th in five years are we going to be in a post-Google world? Yes or no? If if yes, you gotta do this. If no Still do it because it'll benefit your your Google search results. Um I don't think this stuff's that tough.
Mac King
True. But the early data is also, I mean again, early data emphasis, underline, bold it. Um but the early data is showing us that this is not taking away from Google. It's adding on top of. So Google search results and the Google uh as an organic sex uh traffic source is is remaining consistent amongst our clients at the very least and I think I've seen a couple other data points of this. What's happening is that there's just a m a little bit more of pie growing And it's grown through ChatGPT and through Perplexity and Cloud, etc. Now, that also could be an attribution issue. I think like that's the other thing to discuss when it comes to these AI search tools. is that oftentimes people are looking through AI search functionality and then going to Google and finding the link to the actual site. So Sometimes it i you know in chat GPT and you're talking about which brands to choose, they'll just give you a name. You know, it's not gonna give you a link, it's not gonna give you a title card, a commerce card. So then that's actually, and then people are very comfortable switching going to Google to find the actual thing. So they'll switch from open a new tab, go to Google, search the brand, click on the website, oh, and boom, you think it's organic search. But really it actually came from a suggestion on Chat GPT. So You know, the Google Pi is remaining the same. However, um ChatGPT, Perplexity Cloud, all of these AI search engines are influencing what people are choosing to click on and search through.
Kurt Elster
Well, all right. So one of the other things we need to touch on is uh more technical, but the storefront MCP, some of the things that Shopify is doing to lay the groundwork. For this post-Google future. We know they've got uh partnerships, it appears, with with ChatGPT in Perplexity to feed, uh to make Shopify product catalog data available to those platforms. We know that a goal is to have a world where people can purchase through these AIs directly from your site, and that this stuff will just plug in and work. automatically with your Shopify store, you know, without you having to like go through some big process here. I think that's where we're headed pretty quickly. Um and then they have a a tool called the the storefront MCP, which essentially is a way for an AI chatbot to directly query the store. with questions and get answers and then like it indexes it, you could see it, and you could adjust the uh the answers in the future should other folks ask. This one I have yet to see a store where this pops up. Like there's I forgot the name, but there's an app where um Shopify will show you.
Mac King
You know, if this is a Knowledge Base app.
Kurt Elster
Knowledge base, thank you. I haven't seen it happen yet, you know, where an AI used that that MCP, but I'm glad it's there. Any, you know, thoughts or experience with it?
Mac King
I completely agree. I mean, here's the thing, and I and I said it four times already while talking. We're early. So, like if you're listening to this, you're early. You're thinking about all the right things, but it's all early. Um And if the trends continue in the way that it's supposed to, you're gonna be really grateful that you're using Shopify and that you're that the MCP is referencing your site. Um, that's a fact. But has it had a material impact on our clients yet? Not really. No. Um but we know that Shopify is carrying out, they're making this bet on the future of commerce being well integrated into AI. And not just the future of commerce, future of business. You know, look at the way that ShopWice retailed their internal company, how they hire. Um you know, they they've they've brought on people to to be completely focused on on how to AI optimize their own sales process or how they launch websites using the platform. I mean top to bottom inside and out Shopify's focus on AI. So anybody who's running a brand and be sure that by using the software, by making the selection on Shopify, you're also making uh you know, a hedge against Or a hedge you're you're choosing an AI feature if there is going to be one. Now there might not be, we might all be up this be overblown, everything might be normal in three years. I think that's a possible outcome. Honestly, I do. But at least you're in the right place at the right time to make sure you're gonna capitalize on that tools should it happen, which is most likely.
Kurt Elster
So give me give me one action step. Give me one takeaway. You know what what should somebody do?
Mac King
Start tracking. The very first thing to do when it comes to AI discoverability online is starting start Come up with 10 to 15 different prompts, put them into a software, even though like a custom dashboard, ask Chat DBT. If you you know, is mybusiness. com showing up for any of these 10 prompts? You know, just go ahead and ask the pl those platforms themselves. But if you don't start tracking, you're not going to start looking. And also look at your own Google Analytics. What uh what what lead sources are um moving up the list? Is Cloud, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Grok? Are they starting to show up in your top ten results from a lead source perspective for organic traffic traffic? If so, create a custom dashboard right on your home page, on your on your home screen of your of your computer. and start paying attention to it. So that's the very first thing. Start tracking, take a look at the data, make sure it's going trending in the right direction. And if it is, then start taking steps to put salts in and just be more clever. You know, there's a there's an opportunity right now in the market to be more clever than some of these search engines and capitalize on some of the arbitrage while they're still figuring it out.
Kurt Elster
If things are moving so quickly, how do you stay current?
Mac King
The truth is, everyone is still figuring this out. You know, I I get on a prospect call and someone's like, hey, how do we solve for AI? And my answer is I don't have that answer for you. I'm still learning. We're still learning. We're still hiring. We're You know, it seems like every other morning there's like a new YouTube video of some expert who's has this new hack. And I I watch all of them. You know, I'm interested. I want to know what's going on. But the truth is, like, it's it's this It's something that's happening at the cutting edge of technology that people are still learning in real time. So find someone who is who's part of that learning uh who who's who's an early adopter. Um, whether it's an agency, whether it's a friend of yours, which is an intern someone that you hire as an internal employee, get close or it's maybe you, maybe you have the time. I I need to invest five hours a week of my own time every week to make sure I'm staying at on top on on top of AI search optimization and how I show up on chat G. Um, but if you're not paying attention to it, if you're ignoring that it exists, then you'll never be out of there.
Kurt Elster
Any uh any newsletters you like?
Mac King
Um Tomer from Yappo actually has a really uh informative newsletter on AI as it relates to e-commerce. So Uh I I I can't remember what it's called right now, but Tomer is the CEO of GotPo. Um and uh that yeah, that's really the only one. Actually now there's one other thing in it. SCO FOMO. co.
Kurt Elster
Commerce GPT is Tomers. And I will put that in the show notes.
Mac King
And yeah, SEO FOMO. co is is another uh good resource for AI um and SEO. uh information. Uh but there's a lot of resources online. Also I post a lot of content around AI search optimization.
Kurt Elster
Where do we find where do we find Matt King online?
Mac King
I'm on LinkedIn, yeah, mostly LinkedIn MacKing uh domain. Look me up in the or or on X uh at MacKing.
Kurt Elster
The yeah, all right, I will link to both of those to all that in the show notes. Um and before we go, can I compliment your Jaws shirt? It is Jaw's fiftieth anniversary, I just rewatched that movie recently. And I'm like, you know what? It's really good. It holds up.
Mac King
It holds up Steven Spielberg's first movie, the first summer blockbuster, by the way. I mean, you know, there's so many reasons to love Jaws, but uh like uh well looking back at history uh uh you're right it's the 50s anniversary. There's actually is is a kit. Jaws collab, which is fun. Um, and I love I'm a big fan of Kiff. I love Kiff.
Kurt Elster
Matt King, Domain, thank you so much.
Mac King
Thanks, Kirk. Appreciate you having me on.
Kurt Elster
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