On this page
- 1. Where do you start?
- 2. Which questions will you track, and where do they come from?
- 3. How will you report results?
- 4. Will you check what AI says about my store?
- 5. How do my products reach AI assistants?
- 6. What will you change in my store?
- 7. What do you promise?
- Is it bad if the agency does SEO too?
- What this doesn't settle
AEO, answer engine optimization, is the work of getting your products named when a shopper asks an AI assistant what to buy. Since AI shopping took off, plenty of agencies have added AEO to their services. Some do new work. Some do the same SEO work they always did, under a new name.
That isn't always dishonest. A lot of good SEO does help with AI answers, as we explain in AEO vs SEO for Shopify stores. Even some SEO writers think the new labels add little. Ann Smarty, reviewing Microsoft's AI guide for retailers, wrote that its advice lines up with long-standing SEO tactics.
But if you're hiring someone for AEO, you should know what you're paying for. These seven questions will tell you.
1. Where do you start?
Ask what the first month of work looks like.
An SEO answer: keyword research, page titles, meta descriptions, blog posts.
An AEO answer for a store: your product data. What your product pages and your Shopify admin say about each product: what it's made of, who it's for, what sizes it comes in. AI assistants recommend products they can describe, so the work should start there.
2. Which questions will you track, and where do they come from?
AEO is measured by asking AI assistants the questions shoppers ask, and seeing who gets named. So the questions matter.
A weak answer: a standard list of short, generic questions, like "best skincare brand."
A strong answer: questions built from your customers: their emails, reviews, return reasons and support chats. Real shoppers describe what they need in full sentences. Your tracking should too.
3. How will you report results?
A red flag: a ranking, like "you're #2 in ChatGPT." AI answers change almost every time you ask, so a single position means very little. We explain why in why AI visibility scores jump around.
A good sign: how often your store is named, out of many answers to the same questions, compared with your own starting point.
4. Will you check what AI says about my store?
Being named isn't enough if the answer gets your price or return policy wrong. Ask whether the agency checks the facts in AI answers about your store, and fixes the source when they're wrong.
An agency that only counts mentions isn't checking this.
5. How do my products reach AI assistants?
This question shows whether the agency understands how AI shopping works on Shopify. A good answer covers more than your website. It should mention things like:
- Shopify's agentic storefronts feature, which shares your products with AI channels like ChatGPT.
- Whether AI crawlers can reach your store. A crawler is a program that visits web pages and copies them. Your robots.txt file or a service like Cloudflare can block them.
- Whether your prices and stock match everywhere your products appear.
If the answer is only "we'll get you ranking on Google," that's SEO.
6. What will you change in my store?
Ask for a list of the actual changes. Google's own advice for hiring an SEO says to ask for every change and the reasoning behind it. The same goes for AEO.
For a store, an AEO list should include product details, product descriptions, Shopify's custom product fields (called metafields), and your shipping and return policies. If most of the list is page titles and blog posts, you're looking at an SEO plan.
Be careful with special AI files sold as the main fix. Google says you don't need new machine-readable files or AI text files to appear in its AI answers.
7. What do you promise?
A red flag: a guaranteed spot in ChatGPT's answer, or a guaranteed number of mentions. No one controls what an AI assistant says. Google's hiring advice puts the same point plainly for search: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google."
A good sign: a clear starting point, a list of what will change, and a plan to measure the change against that starting point.
Is it bad if the agency does SEO too?
No. A store that search engines can read well is in a better spot for AI answers too. The question is whether you're getting AEO work on top of the SEO, or the same SEO work with a new label.
At Store AEO, we start with your store's product data, track questions built from your own buyers, and measure against your own starting point. But whoever you hire, these seven questions will show you what you're getting.
To see what an AI assistant can read on your product pages before you talk to anyone, try our free check.
What this doesn't settle
AEO is new, and agencies, including us, are still learning what works best. A good answer to these questions doesn't guarantee good work, and an agency that does mostly SEO may still help your store. Use the questions to see what you're buying, not to rule anyone out on one answer.
