Totally off topic but who is looking into Answer Engine Optimisation

[14Steve14]

We have been getting a bit side tracked and asked AI what are the top ecommerce trends for 2026. Some of the answers were good, but one stood out above the others,. Answer Engine Optimisation. Its more directed to having AI suggest websites for products or help people are asking for. There may have been the other threads about it somewhere else.

We then asked chatGPT and Gemini the same question.

Question 1. What is AEO? and both came up with similar answers explaining all about it.

Question 2. What do I need to do to my current site to help with AEO? Lots and lots of chat and stuff and lots of things about re-writing product descriptions into a different format than we currently do, which will take some time to sort. Add in FAQs section to each page with relevant answers, which seems like a lot of work until it explained this could be things about shipping and payment so it was not too bad.

Question 3, Do any of these suggested changes impact our current SEO work? and surprisingly yes it could, although as more search engines are using AI to generate results the time should be spent on AEO rather than SEO.

Anyway, one of the suggested changes was to remove the Character limit in one part of the product_schema.php header tag module. Apparently any limit was removed years ago by the likes of Google, but has anyone tried this one small change, or come across a suggestion to remove the limit? What I dont want to do is to harm any SEO work already done.

Code: Select all

'description' => substr(trim(preg_replace('/\s\s+/', ' ', strip_tags($product->get('description')))), 0, 197) . '...',
}

[burt]

I will ask AI about it later, but for a knee-jerk response;

- write product descriptions for human consumption

and

- unsure why there is a limit on description there. that can be safely changed.

Code: Select all

'description' => trim(preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', strip_tags(html_entity_decode($product->get('description'), ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8')))),

It might be that the opengraph module came first, and this schema module came from it. opengraph does require a hard limit.

[burt]

As a side note...on topic, but only adjacent. When is the last time you used a search engine ?

I haven't for months, maybe a year. My go to these days is AI searches. Completely cuts down on all the fluff and crapola websites.

[burt]

Found this:

https://developers.google.com/search/do ... tion-guide

[14Steve14]

As a side note...on topic, but only adjacent. When is the last time you used a search engine ?

I haven't for months, maybe a year. My go to these days is AI searches. Completely cuts down on all the fluff and crapola websites.

I think you are right as most of my search results are now AI based I believe. I do still search for specific products which seem to be in the generic searches, which is where I think lots will remain. I have found that more of my searches are now, lets say, question based, which results in the AI part of the searches finding answers.

I guess its a case of getting it right for both types of searches.

My other big problem is stopping search engines, especially the AI ones flooding the website with requests, though I can see why when looking into AEO they need access, otherwise you get left behind in some searches. I also think that one of the other trends was having AI do all the selection and buying which I think was a topic somewhere some time ago.