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Half of shoppers are now searching for products inside AI tools like ChatGPT and Google AI. And the brands showing up there aren't the biggest ones. They're the ones whose product data is structured correctly.

This is AEO: Answer Engine Optimization. It's different from traditional SEO because there's no page two. You're either in the AI's answer or you're not.

Retail Brew reported on a telling example: Urban Outfitters' jeans weren't surfacing in AI product searches because their pages said "denim" but never the word "jeans." That one gap made them invisible.

The same issue is sitting in most Shopify catalogs right now. Product descriptions written for Google rankings don't translate to AI retrieval.

Here's a quick test you can run today: open ChatGPT or Perplexity and ask it to recommend products in your category. If your brand isn't in the answer, you have an AEO gap to close.

This is where the next organic acquisition channel is being decided. Early movers have a window. Read the full breakdown at the link.

Shopify Sidekick got a significant update. A few of these changes are going to save store owners a lot of time.

The big ones:

Sidekick now writes ShopifyQL queries for web performance and payments. Ask it your conversion rate by device, traffic source breakdowns, payout timing by channel. Plain language, no SQL, no manual export.

Chart visualization is live. You can view results as a graph and export them without leaving the conversation.

Sidekick is now inside the segmentation editor. Build and edit customer segments in plain English instead of code. No developer needed.

Annotation markers in Shopify Analytics show you exactly when a theme deploy, app install, or product change happened on your timeline. Finally, an explanation for those mystery metric drops.

If you have been relying on manual reports or waiting on a developer to pull data, this update changes that workflow. Go test a web performance query in Sidekick today and see what it gives you.

Full breakdown at the link.