I just read the exciting news about Shopify’s integration with OpenAI, allowing sales to happen directly within a ChatGPT conversation. This is an incredible new channel, for sure.
It immediately got me thinking about the implications for our existing SEO strategies. We all invest significant effort into optimizing our sites and product pages for visibility on traditional search engines. Now, with the rise of “agentic commerce,” how will product discovery work in a conversational context like ChatGPT?
I’d like to open a discussion on a few points:
Will our current SEO efforts (e.g., keyword optimization, structured data, backlink authority) influence how our products are surfaced and recommended within ChatGPT? Or is it a completely separate discovery ecosystem?
Do we need to develop a new set of “best practices” for this new form of conversational search? For instance, should we write product descriptions differently to better match natural language queries and answers?
How will traffic and sales from purchases made via ChatGPT be attributed in our Shopify analytics? How will this impact the way we measure the ROI of our SEO and content marketing efforts?
I’m very curious to hear your thoughts on how this new frontier might change our approach to optimization and product visibility.
Great questions — a lot of us have been wondering the same thing as “agentic commerce” starts to take shape.
From what we know so far:
Traditional SEO vs. Conversational Discovery
Current SEO signals (keywords, metadata, backlinks) still matter for classic web search and for how your site is indexed by search engines.
But ChatGPT’s shopping integrations rely primarily on structured product data that the app or plug-in receives from Shopify (titles, descriptions, attributes, images, inventory, price, etc.), not on your page-level SEO.
That means: optimizing structured fields — especially product titles, variant names, attributes, and well-written natural-language descriptions — may have more impact than traditional on-page keyword work.
Writing for Natural-Language Queries
Early signs suggest it helps to write product descriptions in clear, conversational language that answers a shopper’s likely questions (e.g. “Is it machine-washable?” vs. keyword-stuffed bullet points).
Rich product attributes (materials, sizing, care instructions, use-cases) will likely give the AI more context to match intent-based queries.
Analytics & Attribution
Sales made directly inside ChatGPT’s commerce flow should still be recorded in Shopify as normal orders with a dedicated sales channel / source once fully rolled out.
We may need to watch for a new channel label (e.g. “ChatGPT” or “Agentic Commerce”) in the Orders → Sales by channel reports to understand its contribution to revenue.
Expect some learning curve here — attribution models and ROI tracking for SEO vs. conversational sales will probably evolve over the next few months.
This is definitely a shift away from search-result rankings toward data quality, feed accuracy, and language clarity.
I’d love to hear if anyone has already tested product copy tweaks specifically for conversational commerce or has insight into how the new channel appears in reports.
Eli here from TinyIMG. I agree with most of what EmixtarDigital said, but heres my take:
SEO is more important than ever. Good SEO leads to good AI search. On our own site we see that clear structured data, FAQs on every article, simple language, and being referenced on other sites really helps.
No need for a new set of best practices. Descriptions should still be written for people. Keep them clear, easy to understand, and matching buyer intent. No need to stuff with keywords - AI already understands the context.
For tracking, I would separate AI traffic from regular SEO traffic. Most AI engines (like ChatGPT) will show when they reference you, so treat that as its own channel. One thing we noticed is that when SEO traffic goes up in search engines, AI traffic usually goes up as well.
Also, always check sources how your competitors show up in AI search engines and which sources reference them. If you can, work on getting your store mentioned in those sources instead. That way you increase your chances of being recommended in ChatGPT, while your competitors get recommended less.