The way consumers search for products online is undergoing a significant shift. AI-powered search tools like Google’s AI Overviews and OpenAI’s ChatGPT are transforming how users discover, evaluate, and purchase products. Instead of clicking through traditional search results, they discover products through conversational answers, often without leaving the search page or AI interface. For your e-commerce business, this presents both a challenge and opportunity.
In the first quarter of 2025, websites have reported a 22% drop in organic search traffic year-over-year following the rollout of Google’s AI Overviews. If your webshop is not visible to AI systems, your products may never reach potential customers. To stay competitive, it is important to make your product data and content AI-ready, while also maintaining traditional SEO practices.
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Google AI Overviews: A new search standard
Google’s AI Overviews, formerly known as the Search Generative Experience (SGE), provide AI-generated summaries at the top of search results. These overviews combine information from different sources, offering users concise answers without the need to click-through to individual websites.
While AI Overviews include source links, the prominence of these summaries can lead to reduced visibility for traditional search listings. Even top-ranking pages may experience fewer clicks as users find the information they need directly in the AI-generated content. To be included in these Overviews, Google emphasizes the importance of clear metadata and up-to-date content.
ChatGPT as a shopping assistant
Another recent development that influences the way that consumers discover new products, is the introduction of shopping results in ChatGPT. Open AI enhanced its chatbot with shopping capabilities, allowing users to receive product suggestions directly within the chat. These recommendations appear as rich product cards, feature images, prices and merchant links. Importantly, these are not paid advertisements. ChatGPT selects these products based on their relevance and metadata.
The accuracy and visibility of your products in ChatGPT’s recommendations heavily depend on the quality of your structured product data. Incomplete or poorly structured data can lead to misrepresentation, misinformation and exclusion from results. Detailed product attributes and natural language descriptions can help you to enhance the likelihood of your products being accurately and compellingly presented to users.
How AI Search threatens traditional clicks
The rise of AI-driven search tools is contributing to a significant increase in “zero-click searches”, where users get answers without visiting any external websites. Some websites have reported up to a 30% drop in organic traffic after the introduction of AI Overviews.
Moreover, the overlap between ChatGPT’s product recommendations and Google’s search results is minimal, with studies indicating only an 8-12% URL overlap. This means that current SEO success does not automatically transfer to AI Search success. To maintain and grow your online presence, it is essential to ensure your products are structured and machine-readable for various AI systems.
Traditional SEO vs AI Optimization: What's different?
While traditional SEO remains important, AI search introduces new optimization requirements. AI systems prioritize content that is easy to crawl, well-structured and written in natural, conversational language. Traditional SEO signals like keywords and backlinks are less influential in AI-driven search rankings.
To optimize your webshop for AI search you need:
- Structured data: Implement comprehensive, structured product data to help AI systems understand and accurately present your products.
- Natural language: Use clear, conversational language in product descriptions to align with AI’s preference for human-like text.
- Content clarity: Ensure your content directly answers potential questions from customers in a straightforward way.
By focusing on these aspects, you can enhance your visibility in AI-generated search results while still supporting traditional SEO efforts.
How PowerSuite.ai helps you get AI-ready
To stand out in AI-driven search results, it is no longer enough to rely on traditional SEO or basic product descriptions. You need to ensure your entire product data ecosystem is optimized for AI systems. This means first classifying your products in a clear, logical structure, with consistent categories and formatting, so AI tools like Google’s AI Overviews can properly understand and group your products.
Next, you should automatically enrich your product data to fill in missing details, fix inconsistencies and provide a complete and accurate view, including generating product descriptions and images for your products. This enriched data serves as the foundation for creating compelling product content.
You should leverage this improved data to generate unique, SEO-optimized product descriptions that reflect your brand’s tone of voice and are tailored for different languages and markets. This helps both search engines and AI systems to present your products effectively, increasing the chances of them appearing in conversational search and shopping results.
All these elements work together to ensure that your webshop’s product data is fully AI-ready, and this is exactly where PowerSuite comes in.
- PowerClass automatically classifies your products into the right categories and format.
- PowerImprove cleans, enriches and completes your product data by detecting and fixing errors and filling in missing attributes.
- PowerText generates unique, AI-friendly and SEO-optimized product descriptions that match your brand’s voice and can be tailored for multiple languages and markets.
- PowerRelate detects product relationships, enhances cross-sell opportunities, improving how AI systems connect and display related products.
By intergrating PowerSuite-tools, you ensure every product is fully described, correctly classified and optimized for AI-driven search and shopping tools. This boosts your online visibility and ensures you stay competitive in the evolving landscape of AI-powered discovery.
Ready to future-proof your e-commerce site? Discover how PowerSuite tools can enhance your AI visibility and drive more traffic. Contact us to talk about all the options!
