As answer engines have become a real discovery channel, retailers and brands have started turning to AEO to show up more often in AI answers. But while visibility in these new spaces is extremely important, success in ecommerce should ultimately be measured by key metrics like add-to-carts, purchases, and revenue. The AEO solutions currently on the market aren’t built specifically for commerce and, as a result, focus on visibility and traffic rather than on where it’s most lucrative to be visible and which traffic will actually drive purchases and revenue.
Here’s an example: Say your nonstick skillet is your best seller overall. But when shoppers ask answer engines for skillets with “even cooking” or “heat retention”, it’s your cast iron skillet that converts far better in terms of add-to-cart and sales. Most AEO tools wouldn’t be able to show you that: They define “win rate” by how often your products are cited in AI answers, not instances where a shopper actually buys. The real win rate in Commerce AEO should measure purchase outcomes and revenue, not just citations.
The other big gap we’ve seen in AEO for ecommerce is that retailers want specific recommendations on how to improve their results and even the ability for the system to take actions on their behalf. Those with content teams want a very specific list of improvements to make. Those with limited content resources sometimes even want help creating that content.
That’s the difference between generalist AEO and AEO built specifically for ecommerce: both track visibility, but only one shows how to actually improve core ecommerce metrics, and then gives you a specific plan to follow, doing most of the work for you.
Commerce AEO is Constructor’s AEO offering. As opposed to generalist AEO tools, it views the goal not as getting people to just come to your site, but as getting shoppers there and getting them to actually make a purchase. And it uses Constructor’s full funnel visibility and AI optimization based on shopper behavioral data, like clicks, add-to-carts, purchases, and revenue to get there. The result is an AEO tool that lets you measure and improve what matters most to your business.
It improves results from external answer engines in three core functions:
Knowing AI sent you traffic is table stakes. Knowing which parts of your catalog drive add-to-carts and sales via Answer Engines in AI is a gap that generalist AEO tools don’t close. Because Constructor already uses shopper behavior data to power onsite discovery, Commerce AEO follows AI-referred sessions all the way to purchase.
Our AI traffic overview connects the different sources (e.g., ChatGPT, Muse, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini,...) and connects them to the ecommerce metrics your team already tracks. That way, your level of insight is elevated from "AI traffic went up this month" to something you can act on: Which source drove it, which categories gained, and did they turn into revenue?
You can’t improve how you show up in AI answers without a baseline. Commerce AEO tracks your share-of-voice across AI surfaces. That goes beyond knowing whether you’re mentioned: It tracks which topics you appear for, which competitors appear alongside you, and how that changes over time as you optimize your visibility.
Once you understand how you’re currently performing, you’ll want an actionable plan to improve your results. Commerce AEO does this in two ways: a technical audit and a set of actionable content recommendations (catalog and entire pages, with examples) tied to actions that will drive increased purchases.
Commerce AEO’s readiness checks work like a technical SEO audit for AI. They show whether your content is structured for AI crawlers to reach and understand it. The tool flags gaps that could cause an answer engine to miss or misstate your catalog, and it makes specific recommendations to improve your results.
The most consistent feedback we’ve heard from retailers about AEO is that they seek specific recommendations to improve awareness and conversion, and they want help creating the content to act on them.
Recommendation
Commerce AEO makes specific recommendations to improve content performance, including fixing or adding product attributes, filling in missing information on PDPs and PLPs, and even creating new product pages and sections. A few examples:
Commerce AEO might recommend adding a comparison feature or page if it notices shoppers frequently ask to compare products in your catalog.
If shoppers frequently ask about skincare routines, and your catalog includes relevant products, Commerce AEO could recommend creating an article titled “The 10-Step Layering Guide to a Skincare Routine,” with relevant products featured at each step.
Creation
The tool doesn’t only make suggestions. With the click of the “Draft” button, Constructor can create the copy itself - descriptions for a PDP, missing product attributes, or even an entirely new page. It’s then up to you to decide if you want to use it as inspiration, make a few edits, or simply publish it as-is. All the content is specifically structured to improve performance across answer engines.
Generate content at scale: A library of thousands of AI-generated buying guides for answer engines to browse (left), each drafted from shopper data to answer the questions that lead to a purchase (right).
Constructor’s platform already connects shopper intent to the right products and measures how it affects the business metrics you care about most. With Commerce AEO, this same approach is extended to optimizing how answer engines discover your catalog.
There are two reasons this works:
First, personalization: Commerce AEO fine-tunes your product pages into AI-ready variants using your shoppers’ real behavior and ecommerce data to surface the product content most likely to convert, making recommendations that are better than a generic best guess.
Second, scale: Across tens of thousands of products, Commerce AEO creates AI-ready pages for every item in the catalog, with content structured, enriched, and legible to AI systems. It leverages insights from your production data to design content that converts - and Constructor is well-equipped to do this, as we already ingest conversion data and enrich catalog attributes at scale.
What we’re building with AEO at Constructor is not only a visibility dashboard for AI traffic. The goal is to provide retailers with the ability to increase visibility with the people most likely to buy their products, measure results, and take actions that continuously improve their performance in offsite discovery across external AI answer engines and agents, including ChatGPT, Muse, Claude, Instinct, Perplexity, Gemini, and others.
With the usage of answer engines and personal AI agents continuing to grow, that’s what executing an agentic commerce strategy will take.
Commerce AEO is now available in beta. Over the coming months, we’re expanding to more retailers, so please get in touch here if you’d like to learn more.