They’re three names for the same job: getting your brand cited when someone asks an AI what to buy. AEO came from the featured snippet era, GEO was coined for ChatGPT and Perplexity, and AI SEO is what most Shopify founders type into Google. The work underneath is identical.

Anyone selling you three separate services for them is selling you the same retainer three times. I wrote up where each term came from and why it doesn’t change the plan in SEO vs AEO vs GEO. One discipline, three labels, pick whichever you like.

About 80 percent of it is the same work done with more discipline. ChatGPT and AI Overviews cite pages that already rank, answer the question in the first sentence, and back it with a source, so good Shopify SEO is the starting point.

The other 20 percent is new. Checking what the models say about your brand, fixing wrong facts, and earning mentions on the sites they trust doesn’t happen in a normal SEO retainer. Rank first, then get cited is the order that works.

They do, and the orders show up in Shopify as chatgpt.com referrals. One skincare brand I work with went from a handful of ChatGPT orders a month to 23 times that in a year, and those buyers convert better than Google traffic because the AI already sold them.

The volume is smaller than Google today. It’s growing faster than any channel I track, and early brands hold the citations once the models settle on who to name. The step by step, with the revenue screenshots, is in how to rank in ChatGPT.

Search Console’s AI performance report shows impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode. Shopify shows revenue from chatgpt.com. A monthly citation check on your buyer questions shows whether you’re named, and who else is.

I report these every month next to your Google sales. If revenue doesn’t move, citations don’t count, so that’s the line I watch.

Not for citations. Ahrefs tested both across a large set of sites this year and neither one changed whether AI cited a page. Agencies keep selling them because they’re easy to deliver, not because they work.

Schema still helps with rich results in regular Google, so I keep it where it earns its place. For AI, clear answers and real mentions are what move the needle, and that’s where the time goes.

Fixing what the models already say about you takes a few weeks, since that’s mostly correcting facts on pages they’ve read. New citations for buyer questions usually take 2 to 4 months as answer-first pages get crawled and picked up.

Mentions on third-party sites take the longest and matter the most. The pages I build are designed so publications and retailers link on their own, which is slower than outreach but sticks.

They cut clicks on informational searches, the “how does this work” queries where the answer is on the results page now. They don’t cut clicks on buying searches nearly as much, because shoppers still need to land on a product to buy it.

That’s why the plan leans into collection and product pages and away from informational posts. When the traffic that does come through lands on a page that isn’t built to sell, that’s the Shopify CRO side, and fewer clicks that convert better is the outcome to aim for.