GEO for e-commerce: how to get AI assistants to cite your products

What GEO is

GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization: the work of getting a site to appear and be cited in AI assistant answers, such as Google's AI features, ChatGPT or Gemini. For a store, it means that when someone asks “which drill is best for concrete” or “which PIM works for a catalog of thousands of products”, the answer mentions your page.

The term was popularized by a 2023 academic study (Aggarwal et al., accepted at KDD 2024), which found that adjusting content can increase its visibility in generative answers by up to 40%, and that what works varies by topic.

What Google says

Google has a page dedicated to its AI features, and the most important part is what it does not ask for: there are no additional requirements or special optimizations to appear in them, and you don't need to create new files or markup. What counts is the usual:

• the page can be crawled and appears in search with a snippet;
• the important content is in text;
• the structured data matches what is visible on the page;
• there is a good page experience and, when they help, quality images and videos.

In other words: GEO is not a separate trick. It is doing the basics well and writing in a way that can be quoted.

Writing to be cited

An assistant builds its answer from fragments. The ones that get cited usually share three things:

1. They answer directly. The first sentence says what it is and what it is for. “750 W hammer drill for concrete, wood and metal” can be quoted on its own.
2. They carry verifiable facts. Dimensions, materials, compatibility, quantities. An adjective cannot be quoted; a fact can.
3. They are consistent. What the description says matches the attributes, the structured data and what each channel publishes.

That is why complete product records have an edge: an assistant comparing options needs specifications, not marketing phrases.

What changes in your catalog

• Answers first. On every product page and content page, the first sentence answers the main question.
• Complete attributes. The data buyers compare, stored as attributes and not lost in a paragraph.
• Correct structured data. Product JSON-LD that says the same as the page.
• Real FAQs. The questions your customer service receives, answered on the page.
• Author and sources. Google asks you to make clear who created the content and what it is based on.

How to measure it

GEO does not yet have a dashboard as clear as SEO's, but it can be measured:

• Search Console: Google includes traffic from its AI features in the web search performance report.
• Test questions: build a list of the questions your buyer would ask —“what is best for…”, “what is the difference between…”— and ask them every month in the most used assistants. Note whether you are cited and which page.
• Cited pages: when an assistant cites one of your pages, check what that page has that others don't. It is almost always a direct answer or a fact nobody else publishes.

What you should avoid is chasing tricks. Assistants change how they pick sources often; a clear, complete and consistent catalog holds up through those changes.

How Bruxel handles it

In Bruxel each description is generated from the product's real data for search engines (SEO) and for AI answers (GEO), in your brand voice and with review before publishing. Attributes, categories and structured data live in the same catalog, so everything says the same thing. See how they are generated in the guide to generating descriptions, and read more about the copy in how to write product descriptions that sell. The PIM page shows the rest.